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Copyright}]! 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Point of View of 
Modern Education 

By Harriet A. Marsh, LL.B. 

Principal of Hancock School, Detroit, Mich., and 
Author of "How Shall Language be Taught?" 
"Are We Becoming Un-American?" etc., etc.. 



PUBLIC SCHOOL PUBLISHING COMPANY 

BLOOMINGTON, ILLINOIS 

1905 



b_B i set 



UBRARY of COKGRESSj 
Two Copies Received 

DEC 4 1905 

C0Dyri ff ht Entry 
i CU / S * XXc.No. 



Copyright 1905 
PUBLIC SCHOOL PUBLISHING COMPANY 

BLOOMINGTON, ILLINOIS 



10- 



To my dear father , my first and noblest teacher, this book 
is affectionately dedicated by the author. 



Preface 



9 I % HIS little book is the substance of lec- 
tures before Mothers' clubs delivered 
from month to month through a series of 
years. It is an effort to make application of 
some of the recent discoveries in science to 
the training of children. 

The now generally accepted theory of the 
growth of the human race through the ages, 
and of each individual born into the world in 
modern times, is that known as evolution. 
The old education was founded upon a radi- 
cally different view of the world and of man. 
Educational practice, especially in later gener- 
ations, has not been consistent with its theory, 
in many important respects, and progressive 
teachers have felt handicapped by a doctrine 
which was opposed to their methods. 

Every institution of the social world is 
now adjusting itself to the theory of evolution. 
The church, the home, and the school have 



been more tardy than science and industrial 
society in obeying its call, but the school is 
now seeking to conform, in its methods, to 
this new movement as rapidly as conditions 
will permit. 

This little volume is merely a series of 
suggestions, which the thoughtful teacher may 
find helpful in her study of children and of 
the relations of the school to the home. It 
is addressed quite as much to parents as to 
teachers and the author hopes it may help to 
bring the school and the home into a close 
and more sympathetic union. 



Table of Contents 

Chapter Page 

I The Growth of the Affections . . I 

II The Three Nerve Centers . . 13 

III The Child and His Teachers . . 24 

IV What the Child Should Learn . 41 
V What the Child Should Learn . . 60 

( Continued) 

VI What the Child Should Learn . 72 

( Continued) 

VII Influences . . . . . 96 

VIII Influences {Continued) . . . 116 

IX Conclusion . . . . .138 

List of Reference Books , . 146 



THE POINT OF VIEW OF 

MODERN EDUCATION. 

I. 

THE GROWTH OF THE AFFECTIONS. 

npHE HOME is the cradle of the human af- 
A fections, and since these have most to do 
with our happiness, it seems profitable to con- 
sider their laws of growth, so that the child 
may be placed under conditions most favorable 
to their proper development. 

The child enters the world a little animal and 
though his advent is attended with all the help- 
lessness indicative of greater brain power, nev- 
ertheless his marks of superiority are, at this 
time, completely hidden, and his needs are 
largely those of his brothers in the animal king- 
dom. The young of any species find great com- 
fort and enjoyment in warmth — animal 
warmth — instinctively "snuggling'' up to any 
living object near them, particularly at night; 
and every naturalist can tell of the various "ar- 



2 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

tificial mothers" in the form of bunches of hair 
or rolls of fur that have been devised to meet 
the need so piteously emphasized by little or- 
phans of every form and color. The human 
baby is no exception to this rule; he learns to 
know his mother through the sense of touch, 
and, perhaps, of smell. Himself an animal, his 
budding affections must have a material or 
sense basis upon which the higher love is 
builded as he rises to a higher plane. The little 
cot bed and the artificial means of nourish- 
ment, so often employed from the moment of 
birth, may, therefore, become a hindrance to 
this development, even though they are fre- 
quently a hygienic necessity. 

Again, the child, like the adult, instinctively 
seeks companionship suited to his own degree 
of intelligence. He cannot, at first, understand 
or appreciate the society of grown people, but 
his dawning interest is aroused by the pres- 
ence of animals ; a pet of some kind, as a dog 
or a cat, something which he can fondle and 
play with, is an absolutely necessary condition 
of his early growth toward a loving and affec- 
tionate manhood. Later on comes the desire 
for the society of other children ; but the child 



GROWTH OF THE AFFECTIONS. 3 

is well on toward youth before he really loves 
parents and friends. We should not, therefore, 
expect too much of dawning capabilities lest 
we weaken them by too early or too vigorous 
exercise. 

Propinquity has also much to do with this 
matter. The child becomes attached only to 
those with whom he is brought in contact; 
hence it follows that he should spend his early 
years in the bosom of his family, where all in- 
terest centers in the home. Attachments and 
habits, the strongest known to man, are now 
forming for life, and any affection or occupa- 
tion which seriously diverts attention from the 
home must prove prejudicial to them, no mat- 
ter how valuable it may be for other things. 
For this reason, the custom of sending chil- 
dren early to school, except when it is the least 
of two evils, should be abandoned. The estab- 
lishment of a wrong relation is most harmful 
because of the fact that it makes more difficult 
the establishment of a right one later. If, dur- 
ing the years that should be devoted to the 
formation of family ties, other absorbing re- 
lationships are allowed to share the child's 
mind, we must not complain, when later on it is 



4 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

found that his strongest attachments and great- 
est interests are sought outside of the home. 
Statistics show that children entering school 
under seven years of age suffer a distinct loss 
in weight and nerve power, yet how often we 
see mothers in comfortable circumstances 
eager to place babies of four in the kindergar- 
ten. The fact that the treatment there is often 
more humane and scientific than that of the 
home does not remove the evils just stated. 
The mere nervous excitement attendant upon 
getting ready for school at a certain hour not 
infrequently deprives the child of all appetite 
for breakfast, and he then rushes off to engage 
for several hours in directed play, while all 
other animals of the same age, relatively, are 
allowed to frisk at will in the fields, or to doze 
unmolested when tired. Why is the child with 
his millions of nerve cells denied the fresh air 
and the freedom so necessary to the develop- 
ment of all other animals ? What farmer would 
subject young calves, or lambs, or colts, or any- 
thing that breathes and has money value, to 
the same treatment? No directed "play," how- 
ever pleasant in itself, is pure play, for the rea- 
son that the child's mind is on the stretch to 



GROWTH OF THE AFFECTIONS. 5 

observe and follow the teacher's motions and 
directions ; hence the three or four hours in the 
kindergarten are as great a drain upon the 
child's nerve power as our morning in the office 
or the school-room is upon us. What he needs is 
more undirected play, more rest, more repose, 
more fresh air. 

But there is another phase of this import- 
ant subject. The child becomes more and more 
interested in his school, just at the time when 
uninterrupted family life should lay the foun- 
dation of the holiest and most sacred relation- 
ships. No human being can serve two masters, 
and the home life suffers in consequence. Ten 
or twelve years later he may leave home with 
comparative safety, but now, in infancy, he 
receives impressions, cultivates affections, and 
forms habits which cannot be gained in later 
years. Failure to understand this principle is 
the one cause of the present decline in home 
influence and parental authority. During the 
first seven or eight years of life every effort 
should be made to center the child's enjoyment 
and interest in the family circle. An entertain- 
ing story after supper, a rosy cheeked apple at 
bed time, some domestic animal to pet and fon- 



6 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

die as one's own, a flower bed to dig and culti- 
vate, keeps many a boy and girl from perdition. 
Curtains and carpets are sometimes preserved 
at the price of human souls. 

Some family duty is, also, of great value in 
promoting affection, for we generally learn 
to love those dependent upon us. But these 
duties must, at first, be very simple and very 
few. Putting father's slippers ready every 
evening, placing baby's spoon by his plate at 
meal time, are quite sufficient for beginners, 
and the child is delighted to find himself of use ; 
while if no one but he is allowed to perform 
these little services, a sense of responsibility 
and helpfulness is gradually developed — an ac- 
quisition of great value in after life. Little gifts 
at Christmas and upon birthdays also tend to 
strengthen affection, if they are the product of 
the child's own effort. A single flower seed 
sown and tended by little hands to place on 
mother's stand in recognition of some anniver- 
sary, brings a joy to both recipient and giver 
which no expensive purchase could bestow; 
while, all the time, loving memories are taking 
root, simple habits forming which will follow 
one to his grave. Perhaps no single device is so 



GROWTH OF THE AFFECTIONS. 7 

valuable in promoting these qualities as is a 
Christmas tree prepared by the children them- 
selves. There is the saving of the pennies ; the 
chains to be made ; the popcorn to be strung ; 
the delighted and important consultations in 
corners ; the wonderful secrets to be kept ; the 
happy dreams and the presents ; a bit of card- 
board stitched in colored wool to grace father's 
new book as a marker; a bead chain for the 
young lady of the family ; a spool box made by 
the son for mother, and regarded by all the 
children as a marvelous work of art; and 
grand-mother's needle book — Heaven help us ! 
One lies before me now made in my own child- 
hood for one of these occasions — a poor faded 
thing fit only for the rag-bag ! The fingers that 
fashioned and the hands that received it are 
resting together in the dust ? but the memory 
of that far off Christmas morning and its at- 
tendant associations are among the strongest 
influences that bind me to home and family. 
These early memories are always the most last- 
ing, and children united in a loving partnership 
during infancy are apt to continue the rela- 
tionship through life. 

Aside from these considerations it is well 



8 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

to learn, early in life, the enjoyment that may 
be gotten from simple things. Wealth may be 
a great blessing, and often is, but one is apt to 
forget that the truest pleasures are not bought 
with money. The child who starts upon a ca- 
reer of indiscriminate spending is always dis- 
contented and unhappy. No purse is long 
enough to supply every want, and life is robbed 
of all real happiness by the constant desire for 
some new possession or some new experience. 
This mental attitude is, of course, fatal to all 
spiritual growth, and explains why children 
possessing all the advantages of wealth and 
opportunity sometimes appear less intelligent 
and less resourceful than those in poorer cir- 
cumstances. Necessity is the mother of inven- 
tion and uneducated human beings seldom 
make an effort unless impelled by want or de- 
sire. Fill the home, especially during the early 
years, with pleasant and tender experiences, 
with co-operative occupations and amusements. 
We begin life as animals, our affections are 
born in the mere animal or physical sensations 
of warmth and comfort; later comes the at- 
tachment to pets — the kitten or the pony ; then 
the desire for the companionship of other chil- 



GROWTH OF THE AFFECTIONS. 9 

dren. These in time lay the foundation for love 
of parents and of other adult relatives. The 
ties of home cannot be made too strong or too 
lasting; they are the steps by which the hu- 
man soul climbs to love of his fellows, to altru- 
ism, nay more, to the love of God himself. The 
child born in a home destitute of affection sel- 
dom emerges with a large love for the race, 
because he carries with him the loveless rela- 
tions formed in the family and, of course, it 
follows that one who has not learned to love his 
fellow whom he hath seen cannot reach the cul- 
minating point of human affection, the love of 
God. Home cannot be too peaceful, too happy, 
too attractive. It is when development is ar- 
rested in one or the other of these stages that 
man remains a materialist and fails to attain 
his highest possibilities. 

Another great aid to the cultivation of affec- 
tion is an early acquaintance with nature, such 
an acquaintance from infancy as can come only 
from a free, untrammeled companionship with 
all her various forms. There are many reasons 
why this should be. Man enters the world with 
about one hundred fifty rudimentary organs; 
organs which are now of no use except as a 



io THE POINT OF VIEW. 

sort of scaffolding upon which other organs are 
built ; for nature does not seem willing to dis- 
card anything once made, preferring rather to 
change it gradually into something else as the 
needs of the organism become different. Take, 
for example, the tadpole ; as he gains in growth 
his tail is slowly absorbed. If, for any reason, 
he should be deprived of his tail he would have 
no hind legs when he develops into a frog. 
Ages ago, in another form, man lived in the 
water and required a breathing apparatus like 
that of other aquatic animals. Traces of the gill 
slits, are even now discernible in the sides of the 
head of the embryo child where they form the 
basis of the ear passages, organs of the throat, 
etc. Now as the human body travels upward 
through all its various stages to reach its pres- 
ent, development, so it is claimed that the mind 
in like manner repeats the experiences of the 
race, each stage forming the foundation upon 
which the next is based. 

Experiences, reaching through ages, may be 
lived in a few weeks by us, and some even 
come to us before birth. It is interesting to 
watch the child as he passes through some of 
the more easily discerned of these steps. At one 



GROWTH OF THE AFFECTIONS. 1 1 

time he is a robber and pounces down upon his 
playmates pretending to rob them. He is now 
in the stage of development represented by the 
race as it roamed the ancient plains in quest of 
plunder. Again he is a tramp and lives the mi- 
gratory life of remote ancestry. So he passes 
through the numberless experiences of the past 
and under proper conditions emerges into 
healthy mental maturity. But if, for any cause, 
he is arrested in one of these stages, the effect 
is deplorable. Arrest in the predatory state 
may mean to be a robber in one form or an- 
other all one's life; in the migratory stage 
to be a tramp; and so of the others. A crimi- 
nal is an example of arrested development. 

The early race lived with nature. Primitive 
man worshiped the sun and moon. God dwelt 
in the fountains and the trees ; stones became 
charms and superstition peopled the earth with 
spirits. Out of all this, man, as he grows intel- 
ligent, progresses steadily toward a pure and 
elevating faith. Thus it is with the child; he, 
too, must pass through these experiences. Let 
him pray to the moon, if he will ; let him talk to 
the flowers and fill his dirty little pocket with 
stones which he fondly believes in as charms. 



12 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

Let him pet and fondle his older brothers, the 
dog and the horse; let him learn to love all 
forms of nature. His faith as a Christian will 
be stronger for these experiences. It is only 
when man's development is arrested that he re- 
mains a pagan, a worshiper of nature instead 
of nature's God.* 



*See Drummond's "Ascent of Man," Chapter 2; also "Peda- 
gogical Seminary," October, 1901; "Some Fundamental Princi- 
ples in Sunday School and Bible Teaching." 



THE THREE NERVE CENTERS. 13 

II. 
THE THREE NERVE CENTERS. 

There are, in the human body, three nerve 
centers whose well being is of commanding im- 
portance to health and happiness. The first 
of these is situated below and back of the heart, 
and its condition through life depends very 
largely upon the child's condition and training 
during the first ten years. Of course man's 
crowning glory is his soul, his spiritual nature, 
but as all the manifestations of his spirit must 
be made through and by means of the body, it 
follows that this body should be properly de- 
veloped and kept in the best possible condition, 
if for no other reason than that it may do its 
work well. 

1. The nerve center just referred to has much 
to do with the stomach and is largely the cause 
of what is called the "blues." Its unhealthy 
state has caused many a man to give himself up 
for lost, and is the prime cause of more than 
half the misery and despair in the world. It is 



14 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

impossible for any human being to take a hope- 
less view of life when this nerve center is 
strong and well. How important, then, that 
the child have a good start in this respect. Dur- 
ing the first ten or twelve years he is, or should 
be, a healthy animal; plenty of simple food, 
plenty of sleep and much living in the open air 
are his essential requirements. If he is in normal 
health he does not care for nor understand 
the sermons we so persistently preach to 
him; all our ethical lessons, with their 
sugar-coated moral tucked in at the end, slip 
from him as easily as water from a duck's back. 
We should be thankful that it is so. It is the 
child's only protection from later indifference, 
hypocrisy, or morbid introspection. When 
older he may learn by these means, perhaps, 
but not now. Nature has provided other teach- 
ers for these early years, but his chief business 
now is to gain perfect health, a strong, vigor- 
ous body, and the needed sense training which 
cannot be acquired later, which are all so 
necessary to the well-being of this important 
nerve center. No social elevation or wealth 
acquired in later life can compensate for neg- 
lect of these requirements. How many capi- 



THE THREE NERVE CENTERS. 15 

talists and scholars would cheerfully yield half 
their kingdom could they gain sweet, refresh- 
ing sleep and be able to enjoy a good dinner! 
We must see to it, therefore, that children store 
up in early life nerve force for later years. 

2. As he emerges from infancy it is notice- 
able that he becomes more active; the tasting, 
touching, and smelling of every object that he 
encounters gradually abate as he gains sense 
experience, and new activities come into play. 
Heretofore his motions have been largely such 
as were controlled by the muscles of the trunk 
or body, but he now begins to use those of the 
arms and legs. Hitherto the large head has 
made rapid locomotion somewhat difficult, but 
when the different members assume juster pro- 
portions he becomes more and more active — 
running, jumping, and climbing. It is the busi- 
ness of these years to cultivate the muscles of 
the arms and legs, not only on account of the 
mere physical growth stimulated by this means, 
but also because the will depends upon this sort 
of exercise for healthy, normal development. 

This nerve center supposed to be the special 
organ of the will is situated in the lower and 
back part of the skull above the spine. Through 



1 6 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

this lesser brain the will controls the muscular 
system and the highest authority in America 
has told us that it is well nigh impossible for a 
strong, healthy will to exist without the cultiva- 
tion of these muscles. Schools which recognize 
this necessity provide for games such as ball 
playing, leap frog, battledoor and shuttlecock, 
and a host of others which give the activity so 
much craved by the young, growing limbs. It 
is, therefore, an unfortunate error to keep little 
girls shut up in the house and to dress them in 
such manner that free play of the limbs is pre- 
vented. A tomboy usually develops into a 
healthy, womanly woman; a pale, delicate girl 
becomes — what ? 

3. The higher nerve centers, those which 
have to do with thought and the higher emo- 
tions, are the last to develop and are dependent 
upon the muscles of the fingers. It is this fact 
that furnishes the argument for manual training 
in the schools, and renders wood carving, fancy 
work and weaving, when not too fine or intri- 
cate, of immense importance to the growing 
boy or girl. The period when this work is most 
beneficial to the child is from the tenth to the 
fifteenth year, though there may be variations 



THE THREE NERVE CENTERS. 17 

according to development or treatment. Chil- 
dren begin to show interest in these occupa- 
tions about the ninth year, and may do the 
coarser kinds of sewing, etc., with great profit. 
The only objection to this time is the general 
tendency to give too much and too intricate 
work, so that it assumes somewhat the char- 
acter of drudgery, whereas the tasks should be 
very simple, admitting of very large stitches 
and employing plenty of pure color. The great 
importance of these facts is, as yet, not well 
understood by women generally. They are apt 
to think that any exercise which brings the 
muscles into play is good — and this is true in a 
general sense — but the truth which needs 
strongest emphasis is that certain nerve cen- 
ters are developed along with certain muscles, 
and that this development is accomplished best 
at certain quite well defined periods of the 
child's life. 

Moreover, the exercise must be of a kind 
adapted to the muscles we wish to train. Young 
men enter our Normal colleges every semester 
confident that years spent in felling trees, or 
following the plow, have given them superior 
muscle training, but a very few weeks' ex- 



1 8 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

perience teaches that such development is, in 
many instances, but little better than none — so 
difficult is it to cure bad habits, to bring stiff- 
ened muscles into play, or to enlarge nerve cells 
that are dependent for healthy growth upon the 
proper exercise of certain sets of muscles at 
earlier periods of life. 

The higher nerve centers (as has been said) 
have to do with the higher emotions ; feelings 
of benevolence, the desire to help the race, to be 
of use to one's fellows, love of God — all have 
their seat in these brain cells that are developed 
through the muscles of the hands and fingers. 
There is, perhaps, no single truth that has so 
much to do with the welfare of the race as 
this. A small, undeveloped hand is not a mark 
of beauty, as some think, but of weakness; a 
sure indication of certain neglected, unedu- 
cated muscles, and a consequent lack of will 
and of emotional strength. 

This is often the source of wrong conclu- 
sions. For instance, an individual who has not 
attained this cultivation of the fingers may, per- 
haps, possess a stronger emotional nature than 
one who has received this training; but this 
is not a right comparison. What one is should 



THE THREE NERVE CENTERS. 19 

be compared with what he might have been. 
How much richer would this man of deep emo- 
tions have been had he received this training-? 
The wealthy and the very poor are alike handi- 
capped in the application of this principle ; one 
by the hard, daily grind of poverty which con- 
verts them into mere machines, and the other 
by a failure to understand its significance and a 
consequent disinclination to all labor, particu- 
larly manual labor. This is only natural. 
Few, if any, are inclined to work, or to 
make any kind of effort unless some benefit 
is to be gained thereby. When once it is 
generally understood that the development 
of the higher nerve centers and the higher 
emotions depends upon the cultivation of the 
fingers, and that the time for this cultivation is 
from the ninth to the fifteenth year, there will 
be a marked change in public sentiment. Not 
only will the rich feel that their children's wel- 
fare depends upon a recognition of and con- 
formity to this truth, but the mutual attitude 
of capital and labor must change because expert 
skill in hand work will give the employer a re- 
spect for the strength and patience necessary to 
success in this kind of occupation. Nothing so 



20 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

tends to sympathy as a common experience. 
Some one has said that to help an ant one must 
be an ant; so, to understand and appreciate 
the dignity of labor one must labor. Knowl- 
edge in this field cannot be gained by proxy. 

An organ is ready for work at the time it at- 
tains its growth, and this readiness is generally 
indicated by an interest in the kind of work 
the organ is intended to do. So, in general, it 
is a good thing to consult the child's inclina- 
tions when planning his occupations. Of course 
this, like every other rule, can be carried to ex- 
tremes. Any one can recall children who are 
never required to do anything against their 
wishes, and who flit from one fancy to another 
in a manner suggestive of very injurious hab- 
its. A sharp, clean cut distinction should al- 
ways be drawn between this sort of dissipation 
and a genuine interest. Necessarily the child 
must have a great deal of latitude in early 
years. His object just now is to gain many new 
interests ; something which cannot be done un- 
less he is allowed numberless experiences, and 
large freedom. System and thoroughness are 
a drawback to this kind of growth ; their time 
comes later. Nevertheless this does not mean 



THE THREE NERVE CENTERS. 21 

that during the first ten or twelve years the 
child should flit from one object to another 
until it is impossible for him to concentrate his 
mind upon anything for more than a moment 
at a time. As he nears his teens, all the tastes 
and fancies that have sprouted during infancy 
and childhood should begin to arrange them- 
selves. Some will drop out of existence alto- 
gether, and some will gradually expand with 
his mental growth into instruments of good 
or evil, for he now begins to show the results 
of earlier training. While it is important that 
the child should have large opportunities for 
observation and day dreaming, yet at the same 
time, certain habits of application should have 
begun to shape themselves in his mind and a 
certain sense of responsibility should be aroused 
if he is to become useful and efficient later on. 

Every phase of education has its own par- 
ticular period, and nothing is more fascinating 
than the study which is to enable us to know 
not only what is to be done but when to do it. 
Perhaps an illustration will make this point 
clearer. Children are interested in the phenom- 
ena of nature at a very tender age. In fact 
their attention is attracted to these as soon as 



22 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

they begin to notice. It follows that they should 
live much of the time with nature from birth. 
Delay in this companionship is often disastrous 
to this interest. The child of six or eight is de- 
lighted to work in a garden, to sow seeds or 
rake the soil, and when you gain his confidence 
he will entertain you for hours with tales of the 
robin that lost its leg, or the bobolink that an- 
swered his call. But let this dawning interest 
be starved or stifled and we have indifference in 
later years. Last spring some older pupils, 
about three hundred, were given flower seeds 
with instructions concerning the planting and 
care of the plants. At the same time seeds and 
instructions were given to an equal number of 
primary children. In the early autumn these 
gardens were examined with the result that just 
twenty times as many neat, flourishing flower 
beds were found in the gardens of the smaller 
children as in those of the grammar grades. The 
reason is not far to seek ; the time for the best 
and fullest cultivation of this interest had gone 
by. Then, too, the older children had a greater 
number of interests. Their attention has be- 
come dissipated by the numberless attractions 
of the bicycle and the rowing party, the foot 



THE THREE NERVE CENTERS. 23 

ball game and the hunt, until growing flowers 
seemed very tame, and one recognizes the grim 
humor of the B 7th composition which stated 
gravely that the only real use of the flower 
bed was to provide blossoms for the button- 
hole "when a boy went out of an evenin.' " 

The purpose of this chapter is to suggest the 
following truths : 

Each nerve center has its own appropriate 
set of muscles upon which it depends for devel- 
opment. 

Each set of muscles has a definite time or age 
for development. 

The higher emotional nature depends upon 
the development of the fingers and hand. 

If we accept the division of time suggested 
by Dr. Sherman Davis, we may say : 

Period of first teeth — sense training related 
to groups of ganglia or nerve center back of 
and below the heart. 

Period of second teeth — muscle training of 
arm and leg related to development of the will. 

Period of wisdom teeth — development of the 
higher emotional nature.* 

*Read Scott's Organic Education, Chapter 1; A Study hi Youth- 
ful Degeneracy, Pedagogical Seminary, page 221; The Study of 
Motor Ability of Children, Annual Report of U. S. Commission- 
er of Education, year 1897-8, Vol. II, Page 1291; Influence of Exercise 
on Growth, Journal Exper. Med. 1896, Vol. I, Page 516; Relation 
Between Growth and Disease, American Medical Association 
1891; Significance of Palatal Deformities in Idiots, Journal of 
Medical Science, Loudon, Jan 1897, Vol. 43, Page 72. 



24 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

III. 

THE CHILD AND HIS TEACHERS. 

TV/T UCH has been said in the former chapters 
"^ to show that the chief function of edu- 

cation in the first ten or twelve years is 
the cultivation of a strong, healthy body, and 
that neglect of this is sure to entail suffering or 
weakness in after life. But, while bearing 
this in mind, it must not be forgotten that this 
period is also most important to mental and 
moral development, and that whether we so 
intend or not, nearly all the fundamental pro- 
cesses of education have been established or ar- 
rested long before the child reaches his teens. 
Now, of course, if the child has intelligent, 
capable parents and an ideal home it would be 
far better for him not to enter a school room 
during his first decade, but since many intelli- 
gent people have not the opportunity to devote 
themselves to their children's education, and 
since many more are not able to do this work 
even when leisure permits, it follows that the 



THE CHILD AND HIS TEACHERS. 25 

primary school is a most valuable and necessary 
institution, a sort of auxiliary home, in which 
the true teacher becomes a kind of foster parent 
to carry on the training which must be given 
during this period ; but as the rare attempts at 
foster parenthood among the lower animals are 
generally rendered unsuccessful through lack 
of experience and knowledge of conditions, so 
in the school room much havoc is wrought by 
its assumption of responsibilities which do not 
belong to it. 

Nothing is more fatal to either an individual 
or an institution than an attempt to relieve it of 
duties peculiarly its own. As the poor are pau- 
perized and debased by any assistance which 
does not render them self-dependent, so is the 
home shorn of its greatest strength when its 
sacred obligations are relegated to another in- 
stitution. The home must continue to be the 
educational institution par excellence, while the 
church, the school, and the state must rally to 
its aid, if only for their own self preservation ; 
but their- support must be of such a character as 
shall recognize its needful supremacy, and rein- 
force its dignity and its power to maintain it. 

Many people seem to assume that education 
-3 



26 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

begins with the child's entrance into the school 
room, but, in point of fact, it commences in the 
cradle, and children learn many rudimentary 
principles long before they can talk. During 
childhood the young have a multitude of teach- 
ers whose methods are of the best, and whose 
success is always assured. Their ends, whether 
good or bad, are invariably attained. They 
work unceasingly during every waking mo- 
ment, and all we can do is to secure the condi- 
tions under which these influences act favorably 
to the child's best development; like a mirror, 
he reflects his surroundings most truthfully. 
Chief among these teachers are Observation, 
Imitation, and Habit. 

OBSERVATION. 

If it were possible for us to remember and 
relate first impressions, we would be much 
astonished to learn how early observation be- 
gins to act its part. Shortly after birth the 
child notices light, then color — red or yellow 
being the first to attract attention. So import- 
ant and lasting are these first sense experiences 
that the kindergarten suspends a red or yellow 
ball over the cradle as the preliminary step in 



THE CHILD AND HIS TEACHERS. 27 

that color training of which they are so justly 
proud. Statistics show that children thus 
trained are rarely if ever color blind. Of 
course other sense impressions, notably that of 
touch, are equally permanent and vivid — that 
of sight being prominently mentioned because 
it is a familiar illustration of this principle. 

IMITATION. 

As the child grows older the power of obser- 
vation grows. Appearance and actions are 
noted and distinguished and at a very early age 
he begins to imitate what he observes. It is 
impossible to over-estimate the power acquired 
from this second teacher. Imitation has been 
the chief agency in making the world what it is 
to-day, and to it you and I owe our customs, 
our dress, and our habits of life. Without it the 
human race would still be merely animals, and 
our little animal, the child, would be incapable 
of education. To be sure, he cannot learn in 
our adult way but only as a child. Things of 
an abstract nature are unnoticed by him, but he 
observes and imitates all he sees and hears; 
nothing objective escapes him. This suggests 
the keynote of all successful training. The child 



28 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

is influenced by what we do; hence the neces- 
sity of absolute honesty and genuine kindness 
in the home and in the school room. Do we 
wish him to be truthful, to respect law, to love 
his neighbor as himself ? All these things must 
be seen in his own home and in the school, for 
the child reflects with unerring accuracy, not 
what he is told, but what he sees others do. 

Everyone knows of the imitative power of the 
Chinese, and some will recall the anecedote of 
the California mistress who, upon the departure 
of Kate, her Irish cook, installed the second girl, 
the celestial John, in the kitchen. At the end 
of the week came the usual supply of groceries 
which the new cook was directed to put away 
"just as Kate did," and forthwith commenced a 
most startling performance. John proceeded to 
take toll of every article before placing it in its 
proper receptacle. First a few ounces of butter 
were taken from a roll, wrapped in paper and 
placed under one end of a couch ; a handful of 
tea disappeared as if by magic in a glass jar be- 
hind the wood box, and in a few minutes all the 
petty dishonesties of months stood disclosed. 
John understood a little English but Kate's 
words had made slight impression on him. It 



THE CHILD AND HIS TEACHERS. 29 

was her actions that were painted indelibly on 
his mind. 

It is so with the infant child. Words are, 
comparatively speaking, unnoticed, but what 
we do, the concrete, is closely observed and imi- 
tated. These earliest impressions are the deep- 
est and last the longest. When the mind be- 
comes enfeebled by age or disease it loses its 
latest acquisitions first. Very old people recall 
with accuracy occurrences of early childhood, 
while the events of later years are entirely for- 
gotten. It is this fact that makes the good home 
so important and so sacred. 

If the relationship suggested in the first chap- 
ter has been faithfully maintained during in- 
fancy there exists a sympathetic understanding 
in the home which is unattainable under other 
conditions. As all the manifestations of spirit 
must be made by and through our physical 
bodies, so all our affections must have a sense 
basis from which, under proper care, they de- 
velop healthily and normally. It is generally 
when the affections are arrested in this early 
stage that a human being becomes a materialist 
in doctrine and a sensualist in practice. 

As has been said, the best teacher for the lit- 



30 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

tie child is a good mother. The world, it is 
true, is full of noble foster parents but every 
fiber in the child's body yearns for sympathy, a 
mother's love, and long before he is able to ex- 
press himself in words he knows by instinct 
whether the arms that encircle him are his 
mother's. Nothing can take the place of this 
sympathy, and no human being can become a 
complete substitute for the mother. A weak, 
careless mother may be better for the child 
than a good teacher or family relative. 

It is generally supposed that the child who 
loses its mother at birth and falls into the hands 
of a good step-mother never knows the differ- 
ence, and it is often asserted that the young 
step-mother feels the same affection for the lit- 
tle orphan as for her own offspring. Such 
a condition seldom exists. Nature never in- 
tended that a relationship so sacred should be 
counterfeited. In an orphan asylum the chil- 
dren are generally better fed, better clothed, 
and better cared for than they ever were in 
their own homes. The nurses love and caress 
them, but upon every face, even of the babies, 
is a certain pathetic expression which shows the 
unconscious craving for mother's love. As well 



THE CHILD AND HIS TEACHERS. 3i 

might one say that the hapless chick hatched in 
an incubator is as happy and comfortable as 
one born under more natural conditions, as to 
say that human babyhood perfectly fulfills its 
destiny save in its mother's arms. 

Some time ago six little children attended a 
certain school. The father was a drunkard, 
the mother washed for their daily bread, and 
the children were ragged and dirty (before 
they entered and had received clothing from 
the teachers. ) The matron of a benevolent in- 
stitution undertook to place them in a better 
environment, and called upon the teachers for 
their help in making the transfer. To her as- 
tonishment they declined, giving as their rea- 
son that the children loved their mother dearly 
and were happy in their attachment to one an- 
other. True, they would have had better 
clothes, better food, and a cleaner home, but 
after all, parental love "is the fulfilling of the 
law" during the child's period of nurture. 

We are often much amused at the child's 
power of imitation, and nowhere is this more 
strikingly shown than in his play. We are 
coming to realize that play is the child's best 
teacher. Watch the baby girl as she washes 



32 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

and dresses her doll, prepares its imaginary 
meal, takes it out for a walk. Every act is a 
copy of what she sees in the home, and all is 
a preparation for the duties of later life. 

But play means more than this. 

Every child, in a sense, goes through the men- 
tal and physical experiences of the race. Proof 
of this theory is traced in children's games, 
each of which is supposed to indicate the period 
of development of the child at that time. For 
instance, we find our boy at one time with an 
inclination to live in caves; at another he de- 
lights in pursuit and capture; at another, in 
deeds of bravery. These are generally thought 
to be mere games which the child selects by 
chance or in imitation of other children, with- 
out regard to their order of development ; but, 
in point of fact, each of these games is indica- 
tive of a certain period in the race's history. 
The child plays at being a robber because he is, 
at that time, living the experiences of the race 
at the time when all were robbers. When he 
plays at being a tramp he is in the stage in 
which his ancestors were migratory. These 
phases of civilization show more plainly and 
last longer with some children than with others, 



THE CHILD AND HIS TEACHERS. 33 

but all have them in greater or less degree 
They promote healthy and normal growth. The 
only possible danger in indulging them is th:.t 
the mind may be arrested in one or the other of 
these stages. The child, whose body grows to 
manhood while his mind remains in the migra- 
tory period, becomes a tramp; if he does not 
develop beyond the predatory age he becomes 
a robber, and so on. A criminal, as said be- 
fore, is an example of arrested moral develop- 
ment. In the next chapter we shall consider the 
means of preventing this arrest; but we will 
now return to our subject. 

HABIT. 

The child's teachers considered thus far are 
Observation, Imitation, and Plays. Few ap- 
preciate the immense importance of these fac- 
tors in the child's education, and still fewer 
understand that he learns far more from his 
games and other associations with children, 
than from any school yet organized. 

The ease with which the child forms habits 
is another peculiarity which renders the first 
ten years so important. Perhaps no one has 
ever given the physiological basis of habit bet- 



34 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

ter than Dr. James, of Harvard University. 
He says, in effect, that all sensations enter 
through the senses — such as the sense of touch, 
or sight, or hearing. That which enters the 
brain must come out again. Now the pathway 
traversed by these discharged sensations be- 
comes a habit if used often enough. 

To explain more fully — Suppose a child sees 
or hears something which angers him. In- 
stantly a message is flashed from a nerve center 
to the appropriate muscles telling the hand to 
strike, or the foot to kick. If this message is 
obeyed, a faint pathway through the brain is 
traced. The next similar feeling of anger 
transmits a similar message and the obedient 
muscles again strike or kick. The same path 
is traversed by this second discharge, and the 
channel is worn a little deeper. Suppose this 
line of action is followed day after day. Is it 
not clear that after a time the child will kick or 
strike automatically whenever he is angered? 
This automatic impulse is a habit. 

The reason habits are so easily formed in 
childhood lies in the fact that more blood is 
supplied to the brain during this period, and the 
brain is softer and more plastic. For this rea- 



THE CHILD AND HIS TEACHERS. 35 

son, too, the habits and impressions of infancy 
and youth are the strongest, those which come 
to us last being the first to leave. 

These physiological facts are of great mo- 
ment, and suggest that moral teaching is made 
most effective by personal example. The child 
is interested in the object, the concrete, and imi- 
tates what he sees. Let him observe our gen- 
tleness or truthfulness and he will follow that, 
if it is not beyond his power to appreciate. 

Every good impulse should find outlet in an 
appropriate action, else it is lost and the capa- 
bility for future good impulses is weakened. 
So if the child reads a touching story, sees a pa- 
thetic play, or is touched by some scene of suf- 
fering, the feeling of pity thus aroused should 
find an outlet in some kind action, even though 
trivial. In this way the habit of alleviating 
suffering is formed, which will grow with the 
child's growth, unless we drain his sympathies 
by too early and too active stimulation. 

There is great danger of this latter, especi- 
ally when the child is particularly susceptible 
to feeling keenly the sufferings of others. Pre- 
cocity in any direction should not be encour- 
aged, for the child pays dearly for it in later 



36 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

life. Remember that it is the business of the 
first twelve years to cultivate a healthy, happy 
body as the foundation of later muscular 
strength and nerve force. But let us remember 
to cultivate this healthy body by exercising it 
in giving utterance to good impulses through 
appropriate action. 

The dawn of the higher emotional nature 
comes with the dawn of the period of adoles- 
cense, and the child should enter this period of 
his life with emotions fresh, and with fancy 
free. Undue excitement, undue stimulation 
of any sort is largely responsible for the jaded, 
blase little men and women one so often meets. 

Some times the children are so overworked 
that they have no nerve force left for the duties 
or enjoyments of later years. What is taken 
for indifference or cynicism is really fatigue. 
Often a baby of three or four years is enrolled 
in a kindergarten ; he loves the teacher, and the 
games and the community life appeal to him. 
His naturally bright mind becomes still brighter 
under this stimulation. At six he enters the 
primary school and continues to delight both 
mother and teacher until he reaches the third 
or fourth grade, and then our prodigy begins 



THE CHILD AND HIS TEACHERS. 37 

to show an alarming change. The lessons once 
so easy are dull and difficult. The teacher 
whose room he has just entered does not "un- 
derstand him." She fails "to explain" suffi- 
ciently, and school becomes hateful to him. 

The difficulty lies in the fact that the child is 
simply worn out. All the strength and nerve 
force which should have been stored up for the 
wear and tear of later years has been exhausted 
by his too early application to work. He is not 
able to go on any more than a locomotive is 
able to move after the supply of coal and water 
is exhausted. Everyone is familiar with exam- 
ples of this kind, and many know, also, that 
statistics show that the child entering school 
under seven loses in weight and is retarded in 
growth during the first year. Who will make 
the application? Is it not possible that the con- 
ditions for "race suicide" begin right here? 

LAW OF ASSOCIATION. 

The fourth and last teacher to be mentioned 
is the law of association, which means that if 
two things are once associated together in the 
mind the later appearance of one will recall the 
other. This principle is wonderfully useful in 



38 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

many ways by helping to fix or recall that 
which we wish to remember, but, like every 
other good thing, it is capable of working mis- 
chief under unfavorable conditions. We let 
the child play in a certain room some morning. 
Our return to the room a week after recalls 
the play to the child's mind even though it may 
not have occurred to him in the meantime. And 
it is surprising how soon these associations are 
formed. A romp with the pillows at bedtime 
brings a request for a romp the next night. 

Good or bad, happy or sad, these connected 
pictures are constantly forming the child's 
mind and it is for us to see to it that, so far as 
possible, they are happy and good. Even very 
young animals show the influence of this law. 
Their tricks are learned by means of certain as- 
sociations, and many have heard of the horse 
(not young) which was loaned to a clergyman 
who wished to take his friend for a drive. The 
road chosen happened to be one often traversed 
by the horse's owner, and the clergyman's cha- 
grin may be imagined as the faithful animal, 
of its own accord, would draw up to every pub- 
lic house on the road. So if children are al- 
lowed to play in a certain street, or garden, or 



THE CHILD AND HIS TEACHERS. 39 

building, a later return to this place will recall 
the occupations associated with it, and render 
a different train of thought difficult to follow. 

Human intelligence presents many strange 
inconsistencies. This law of association, 
though often disregarded in training children, 
is well understood and keenly followed in its 
relation to other interests. This is particularly 
true in an army. Visit a fort at sundown when 
the flag is being lowered. Observe the order 
and precision in every movement, the martial 
music, the bared head, the respectful silence as 
the sacred emblem flutters to the ground. All 
this ceremony and parade are not for appear- 
ance only; they have a far deeper meaning. 
Everything pertaining to the flag is treated 
with the greatest respect and formality. Why ? 
So that in every phase of the soldier's life the 
presence of the flag shall recall the feelings with 
which it has been associated. This is absolutely 
necessary to the unity and strength of the army. 
How long would any people remain united if 
their flag was treated with disrespect? 

So too with the religious emotions. Better 
a thousand times that no prayer be offered, no 
hymn sung, than to conduct any religious exer- 



40 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

cise with children who are laughing and chat- 
tering. They should never believe that prayer 
or praise to God can be offered under such con- 
ditions. When once the child makes this irrev- 
erent association in his mind he has taken a 
long step in the direction of irreligion and un- 
belief. 

RESUME. 

i. The child's education commences as soon 
as he begins to take notice ? and his character is 
largely formed before he enters school. 

2. The child is interested in the concrete, the 
objective; he therefore, pays more attention 
to actions than to words. 

3. The chief factors in his education are ob- 
servation, association, habit, and games and 
plays.* 



*Consult the following - for further suggestions: Study of 
Imitation— Annual Report Commissioner of Education. Vol. I, 
1896-97, chapter 13; Industrial Education, same, page 443: College 
Athletics, same, page 705; Physical Training, Annual Reports of 
Commissioner of Education, 1898, Vol. I, page 487; Babies and 
Monkeys— Popular Science Monthly, Jan., 1895, Vol. 46, page 371; 
The Boyhood of Great Men, Annual Report of Education, 1898, Vol. 
2, page 1294: The Sorrows of Childhood, Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9. 



WHAT THE CHILD SHOULD LEARN. 41 

IV. 
WHAT THE CHILD SHOULD LEARN. 

"A little natural philosophy and the first entrance into it doth 
dispose the opinion to atheism; but on the other side, much natu- 
ral philosophy and the wading deep into it will bring- men's 
minds to religion." — Bacon. 

FT IS generally admitted that the first nine 
■** years of life are the most important from 
an educational point of view, but compara- 
tively few are equally clear as to the time when 
the child's education really begins. Fewer still 
have decided convictions as to zvhere he should 
begin. Many suppose his entrance into the kind- 
ergarten or the primary school marks the be- 
ginning of this important work, while others 
place it at a still later period. 

The child enters the world in a perfectly 
helpless condition. Practically he is blind, deaf 
and dumb; unconscious of any object — even of 
himself. Gradually the outer world is revealed 
to him through the sense of touch. This awak- 
ens desire or inclination. His education com- 
mences the moment this inclination or desire 
encounters opposition, and its trend is deter- 



42 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

mined by the manner in which the obstacle is 
surmounted. 

Thus a very young babe is rocked to sleep, 
or carried to and fro. A few experiences of this 
nature teach him the pleasurable sensation of 
motion and he refuses to be lulled to sleep by 
other means. Whether it is physiologically 
harmful to rock a child to sleep or to walk about 
with him is not now the question. Do his de- 
sires conflict with the parent's will? Here his 
education begins. It is his first lesson in obedi- 
ence, and according to its method he takes his 
first step downward toward self-indulgence and 
ruin, or upward toward self-control. Whether 
we will it or not, we find ourselves confronted, 
from birth to old age, by obstacles which we 
must surmount or to which we must yield. The 
decision as to which ones shall be overcome, and 
which shall be permitted to prevail against us, 
constitute the chief problem of life. The abil- 
ity to overcome or to yield as judgment may 
direct, can only be gained through self-control, 
and self-control comes only through practice in 
obedience to law. Law must come to the child, 
at first, from without. Later he finds it within ; 
he becomes a law unto himself. But until the 



OBEDIENCE. 43 

knowledge of the truth has made him free he 
must obey external law. 

Now it would be the height of folly to as- 
sume that all children learn the lessons of obed- 
ience with equal ease or in the same time. Her- 
edity and environment each exerts its influence 
and very much depends upon the wisdom of 
those who enforce the obedience. The require- 
ments at first should be few and simple, so as 
not to perplex or distress the little ones need- 
lessly; but when once the decision has been 
made obedience should be secured. Under such 
conditions it is cruelly wrong to issue unneces- 
sary prohibitions. The best and wisest of us 
often err in this respect because our childhood is 
so far behind us that we have only a misty rec- 
ollection of the sharp struggles and the keen 
disappointments of infancy. It is the only safe 
rule never to say "No" or "Yes" to a child un- 
less we have a good reason for doing so. Of 
course conflict is inevitable here. Perfect 
agreement between the parent's will and the 
child's would show the inability of the child to 
choose, — a condition bordering on imbecility — 
or else the governing power would need to be 
omniscient, while the governed would need the 



44 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

ability to recognize this omniscience under all 
conditions, coupled with a self-control so mar- 
velous that he could at all times subjugate his 
desire to his judgment — conditions impossible 
alike to the adult and the child. But the neces- 
sity for this struggle should cause us no anxiety ; 
it should be welcomed rather as nature's method 
of growth. No opposition, no combat ; no com- 
bat, no growth. Every square foot of earth pro- 
claims this universal law of nature; every 
plant, every animal, every insect living upon 
the earth is living because of its ability to 
maintain this conflict. Man is no exception to 
this law. Every muscle, every nerve and brain 
cell in his body is subject to this law of growth 
manifest in all other forms of life, while our 
moral and spiritual development are alike de- 
pendent upon the same all embracing principle. 
"To the stars through difficulties." 

USE AND ABUSE OF PUNISHMENT. 

Since the fundamental principle of growth, 
physical and spiritual, is obedience to law, it 
follows that the first lesson for those who know 
not the law, must be that of obedience to 
some force or power outside of themselves and 



PUNISHMENTS. 45 

quite other than their will or desire. Of course 
at a later period the element of choice enters 
into this conformity, but now they are receiving 
their first lesson in obedience to the will of an- 
other. Judgment has not yet become active. 
The child is incapable of any real choice; so 
the first page of life's primer demands obedience 
per se, and it must be mastered thoroughly if 
he would read the succeeding chapters under- 
standingly. The child may not wish to obey. 
Inclination is strong and he feels no need of 
disregarding it. Compulsion may become nec- 
essary, and this brings us face to face with the 
question of punishments. 

Punishments are generally of two classes: 
( I ) the deprivation of certain privileges, as the 
forfeiting of a coveted outing, or the omission 
of the bed-time story. (2) In the second class 
are included all attempts to "make the punish- 
ment fit the crime." The floor littered with bits 
of paper must be restored to its former condi- 
tion; injury to property must be repaired to 
the extent of the offender's ability — the object 
being to awaken the child's mind to a recogni- 
tion of the rights of others, and at the same 
time teach him to feel that wrong-doing always 



46 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

brings with it the need of reparation. This lat- 
ter class of punishment is in all respects most 
logical and salutary, but there are cases — but 
not many — where neither of these methods 
seems efficacious, and appeal is made to physi- 
cal pain or discomfort. 

Of Corporal Punishment so much has been 
said in recent years, and the matter is so im- 
portant, that it behooves us to look into the sub- 
ject with some care. The objections made to 
this mode of correction are as follows : — 

First — The sensation of physical pain is 
evanescent ; it passes off more quickly than any 
other of equal intensity. 

Second — Physical pain causes a great de- 
struction of nerve tissue, and is, therefore, from 
an economic standpoint, a most expensive and 
unwarranted method of correction. 

Third — It is merely an appeal to our animal 
nature, and, for this reason, it is degrading 
and brutalizing. 

Fourth — Real obedience, that of the heart, is 
never gained through corporal punishment. 

Fifth — The highest and noblest efforts possi- 
ble to man are obtained through interest — i. e., 
our best is attained only under pleasurable con- 
ditions. 



PUNISHMENTS. 47 

Sixth — Corporal punishment attacks and 
dulls the child's sense of honor. 

Let us consider these objections for a mo- 
ment, at the same time bearing two cautions in 
mind : First, that nothing is so false, so decep- 
tive, as a half truth ; second, that blind adher- 
ence to any principle, especially when accom- 
panied, as it often is, by a disregard of co-oper- 
ating or adjusting laws, must necessarily result 
in injury if not in the total subversion of the 
principle. 

As to the first objection, that physical pain is 
the most fleeting of all sensations, little need be 
said since the argument is in favor of rather 
than opposed to its use. No one would wish to 
inflict any sort of punishment that could last an 
instant longer than the purpose of it rendered 
necessary. 

The alleged destruction of nerve tissue, so far 
as it is true, is a far more serious charge against 
this means of coercion, but it should be under- 
stood, clearly and unmistakably, that the brutal 
and unmerited whippings of a former genera- 
tion are not considered, and therefore not reck- 
oned with in these pages ; for them no excuse 
can be offered save ignorance and that mysteri- 



48 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

ous and all pervading influence generally known 
as "the spirit of the times." 

History teaches that severity is not neces- 
sary to the efficacy of punishment — rather the 
contrary — its chief requirements being just- 
ness, certainty, and, above all, a perfect adapta- 
tion to the physical and mental status of the 
culprit. Now if we admit that the human child 
is in the beginning merely an animal and that 
his spiritual nature is a potentiality to become a 
reality through a process of growth, there must 
be a mixture of physical and spiritual influences 
used in his correction. This evolution may be 
rapid or comparatively slow, being dependent 
upon heredity and environment. Some unfor- 
tunate beings seem to be arrested in this animal 
stage, and to remain in it all their lives (as is 
true of many criminals), while others born un- 
der happier conditions appear to grow out of it 
very early. Now while the animal nature pre- 
dominates appeal may be made through physical 
pain and discomfort, but it should give place to 
other means as rapidly as the higher nature is 
awakened and the child becomes amenable to 
higher motives for right conduct. The infant 
has no idea of moral duty, and a few light slaps 



PUNISHMENTS. 49 

of the hand with a reproving countenance are 
often the only argument the very young child 
can understand. Such admonition best fits the 
conditions. 

A kind-hearted and able physician once stated 
that when the little body was stiffened with an- 
ger, the limbs rigid and the face red with con- 
gested blood, a few light slaps upon the lower 
part of the body, acting as a counter irritant, 
gave the best possible relief to the overcharged 
blood vessels, producing a similar effect to that 
produced by the mustard plaster. With the 
average child the necessity for this mode of 
punishment ought to disappear gradually, and 
should seldom be necessary after the ninth or 
tenth year. 

Many, of course, will not need it at all ; but 
it is to be feared their number is smaller than 
maternal affection or sentiment leads some to 
think. Our chief difficulty in child training 
seems to lie in the inability to see that the child 
grows in a regular and well defined order. 
Stage follows stage in an appointed suc- 
cession, and each stage should receive the treat- 
ment adapted to it. While it may be possible, 
by judicious care, to make this progression from 



50 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

stage to stage more rapid, it is also possible that 
under certain other conditions this natural ad- 
vancement may be retarded or even checked 
altogether by injudicious treatment. 

Be this as it may, nothing can be gained by 
urging ethical motives for conduct before 
the ethical nature has budded, for we know- 
that any hot-house forcing of spiritual growth 
is fatal to later development. All danger sig- 
nals must be regarded, and so far as human 
wisdom can discern, the proper remedy for each 
stage should be provided. The immature na- 
ture capable of appreciating only physical sen- 
sations, must be appealed to through his physi- 
cal sensations, and neither affection nor vanity 
should lead us to suppose that the child we love 
so tenderly is to develop under different laws 
from those which govern and always have gov- 
erned the race. 

All this may sound despotic to advanced no- 
tions of child education, and more applicable 
to a primitive age, or to a military form of gov- 
ernment than to a free republic, but if evolution 
is the law of the universe, does it not suggest 
iihat the child, passing through the different ex- 
periences of the race, can be restrained best 



PUNISHMENTS. 51 

in each stage of development by the means 
that have been adopted by the best and most in- 
telligent of the race at each corresponding step 
in human history ? Despotic appeals to physical 
pain seem to have been the earliest means of 
control employed by any people. Though ad- 
vancement has greatly modified these elemen- 
tary practices, is it not probable that the young 
child passes through enough of this early ex- 
perience of the race to render a touch of them 
salutary ? 

Does it seem irrational to conclude that a be- 
ing in whom the animal nature is so prominent 
as in the young child can be best controlled, 
sometimes, through his physical sensations? 
Will not his adherence to law, in future years, 
be stronger and more enduring because it has 
grown, step by step, from this physical basis in 
accord with what seems to be a law of both our 
physical and spiritual development? 

It is useless for parent or teacher to ignore 
the fact that children must grow according to 
natural laws. As well might the frog refuse to 
pass its childhood as a tadpole, or the butterfly 
to crawl before it flies, as for man to refuse to 
recognize that he begins life as an animal, and 



52 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

that his transformation into a spiritual being is 
by a slow process of growth out of the animal 
into the spiritual. 

The most serious defect in our system at 
present seems to lie in the very general effort 
to present ethical motives for conduct before 
the ethical nature is sufficiently developed to 
appreciate them. History reveals the fact that 
no race of people has exhibited the highest 
standard of virtue in its childhood. It has 
grown slowly, step by step. What reason have 
we to suppose that our embryo man can spring 
full-fledged into a virtuous manhood ? And can 
it be brutalizing to use the means of correction 
which best answer to his stage of growth? It 
would be brutal to retain this mode of punish- 
ment after the child is capable of responding 
to higher motives, and the higher motive should 
be employed as soon as it can be appreciated 
and it should be presented to him repeatedly 
before he can appreciate it. 

It is true, to be sure, that genuine obedience, 
obedience that springs from the heart, is not 
the direct result of coercion. But the child does 
not rise to this plane of duty at a bound. This 
moral excellence is a superstructure whose 



MORAL STRENGTH. 53 

foundation is obedience to external authority 
which has become habit in childhood. To ig- 
nore this order of growth is an error too pre- 
valent in the education of the young. 

Then, too, we are prone to lay great stress 
upon the pleasure of work, the value of interest, 
its effect upon effort, etc. While all this em- 
phasis cannot be laid too early, and too much 
cannot be said in favor of it, there is another 
truth equally important which the present gen- 
eration is in danger of forgetting — the import- 
ant part which struggle plays in the child's de- 
velopment. 

One thinker has said that the child gains his 
moral strength through the conflict of his own 
will with that of his parents ; and he adds "that 
as the child progresses toward manhood he 
should gradually gain his freedom, lest he know 
not how to use his liberty upon reaching matur- 
ity, and how to govern others having never 
governed himself." He declares that "self-gov- 
ernment is first dependent upon that implicit 
obedience in childhood to a higher will which 
leads to self-control; and second, to judicious 
freedom in thought and conduct which, being 
gained slowly and by degrees, gives scope to 



54 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

the judgment. Success in life, great or small, 
is determined by the degree of self-control that 
has been acquired. 

The assertion that corporal punishment dulls 
the child's sense of honor implies that the sense 
of honor has awakened in the child. When 
this sense has become active, corporal punish- 
ment is never the remedy. But the humiliation 
that attends the violation of one's sense of per- 
sonal dignity or honor is not possible to a child 
who has no such sense. When it is once awak- 
ened the child can be better controlled by other 
influences. 

Much has been said about the decline of par- 
ental authority during the past quarter of the 
century. There are grounds for this charge. 
Not least among these is the fact that parents 
of the generation now reaching maturity re- 
ceived a training in which one of the elements 
of leadership was lacking ;— that of freedom. 
Fifty years ago a child in a well ordered home 
was "seen but not heard." But when that gener- 
ation neared the age when self-assertion is ben- 
eficial, pedagogy took a turn: — the little child 
came to the front and has remained there ever 
since as leader of the procession. As a natural 



MORAL STRENGTH. 55 

consequence the mothers of the present day 
have remained in the background. They re- 
ceived the necessary training in obedience, but 
the freedom which should have come later was 
denied them. They never "came out" until 
called to assume the leadership of their own 
home. Is it any wonder that judgment was 
sometimes lacking ? The men of this age found 
a partial corrective in their earlier and more 
active contact with the outer world, but the 
error has affected with full force the more se- 
cluded girl just budding into womanhood. 

This lack, however, will not be felt by many 
of the children now nearing maturity. In a 
majority of cases they have enjoyed unlimited 
freedom from babyhood, the preliminary train- 
ing in obedience having been eliminated from 
their education. Modern sentiment is prone to 
revolt from suppression of any kind. It would 
be wrong to deny that many advantages have 
accrued to children under this freer dispensa- 
tion, but the evidence is cumulative that free- 
dom without obedience will always prove as 
great an evil as obedience without freedom. 
Life is a partial failure everywhere without 
both. 



56 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

The leading objectors to corporal punish- 
ment are not always our ablest thinkers. With 
honorable exceptions they are persons engaged 
in occupations offering little opportunity for 
intelligent personal investigation of the subject. 
This retards true progress for the reason that 
there is always a large number of people who are 
easily swayed by what seems to them to be pub- 
lic opinion because it happens to be the only 
opinion publicly expressed at the time. We 
should be slow to abolish by law this mode of 
correction from the school where children of all 
stages of development are grouped together un- 
der teachers who, in their efforts to maintain 
the required discipline, are often led to the 
adoption of means far less honorable and effica- 
cious; such as pinching, jerking, shaking, hold- 
ing up to ridicule, shutting in the dark, and 
"nagging;" practices too often the recourse of 
those whose poor health, lack of pedagogical 
training, or overcrowded school room, make 
coercion necessary to secure order. 

But, it must be borne in mind that corporal 
punishment loses its efficacy as the child gains 
in appreciation of higher motives for conduct. 
Punishment, to be effective, should be : 



MORAL STRENGTH. 57 

First, certain. The element of uncertainty 
often seems to awaken in the child a desire to 
see how far and how long he can disobey with 
impunity. The same impulse which induces an 
older person to bet on the board of trade, or 
to frequent the gaming tables at Monte Carlo, 
will lead the boy to take chances on his teacher's 
patience or powers of endurance. Punishment 
should be certain for many reasons. 

Second, it should be just. History shows no 
bloodier page than that which records the race's 
struggle for fair treatment; and no effort at 
restraint which lacks this element is effective 
for long. Though our ethical standard is 
higher than his, the child's moral sense is often 
keener than ours. His horizon is narrow and, 
therefore, he should be encouraged to state his 
view of the matter and punishment should not 
be administered until there is sufficient evidence 
that the child believes it to be just. 

Third, it should be adapted to the child's de- 
velopment. It is the height of cruelty to force 
upon the child motives he cannot understand. 
It is brutal to continue a mode of punishment 
that he has outgrown. Sound judgment and a 
kind heart should determine both the rewards 



58 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

and the punishments of the school, and they 
should be the sound judgment and kind heart 
of the teacher in charge. Farming out children 
for punishment to the principal or superintend- 
ent does not strengthen the teacher and is gen- 
erally harmful to the child. 

OTHER PUNISHMENTS. 

The same general principles apply to all 
forms of punishment, inasmuch as all are for 
the same purpose; and it need hardly be said 
that the mildest means that will accomplish the 
desired end are always the best. Few realize the 
suffering of a nervous child put to bed in the 
dark or shut up in closet. Tantalizing, taunt- 
ing and exposing to ridicule are especially rep- 
rehensible. 

Whatever the means of correction used it 
must be remembered that its efficacy will de- 
pend not only upon the spirit and manner of it, 
but also upon its infrequency. 

When the French Revolution was at its 
height, once sensitive ladies attended public 
executions, calmly sipping coffee as they wit- 
nessed the most revolting acts of cruelty. We 
express horror at the brutality of our ancestors, 



INFREQUENCY OF PUNISHMENTS. 59 

but we should soon find ourselves doing the 
same thing under similar conditions, simply be- 
cause any experience, pleasurable or painful, 
will affect us less the second time when it did 
the first ; every repetition lessens the effect un- 
til we become in a measure indifferent to what 
were once intense feelings. 

This law must be taken into the account in 
the child's training, since we are apt, other- 
wise, to render him callous to all the means we 
employ for his improvement. Wisdom and 
self-control are never more necessary than 
when we attempt to correct the fault of another. 
It is also well to remember that the immature 
mind is not always the inferior mind. Superi- 
ority in age, the relation to parent or teacher, 
or any other exterior condition will not give us 
governing power unless we have learned to 
govern ourselves. 

"Punishments as seen by Children"' Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. 
3, P. 235; "Educative Value of Children's Questioning-" Popular 
Science Monthly, XLIV, P. 799; "Child Study & Religious Educa- 
tion" Child Study Monthly, Oct. 1896, Vol. 2, P. 289; "Fatigue in 
School Children" Educational Review, Jan. 1898, P. 34; the Public 
School and tbe Public Library" Annual Report Commissioner of 
Education 1898, Vol. 1, P. 487; "The History of Sunday Schools" 
Annual report Com. of Education 1896-97, Vol. 1, P. 351. 



60 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

CHAPTER V. 

WHAT THE CHILD SHOULD LEARN.— 

Continued. 
F WE believe that among the first lessons 



i 



the child must learn, is obedience, pure and 
simple, the next matter for our consideration is 
the direction this obedience shall take. The 
child advances from the general to the specific 
application of this law and learns by degrees 
that while he is expected to follow the actual 
guidance of those around him, there are certain 
acts which are always forbidden because of 
some inherent quality in themselves. This 
would cover such infringements of the moral 
law, as stealing, lying, and the like. 

Stealing. 

Of course, the little child at first knows no 
distinction between his property and another's. 
He learns this chiefly from the way in which 
his belongings are considered. His treatment 
of his neighbor in adult life depends very 



FORBIDDEN ACTS. 61 

much upon these first experiences in the home. 
Why should we expect him to grow in re- 
spect for the property of others when his 
treasures are kicked about, or thrown away, or 
given to younger brothers or sisters without 
reference to his wishes ? He learns by what he 
sees more than by what we tell him, and if his 
property is respected, he gradually grows into 
a respect for the property of others. By degrees 
this distinction may become sharp and clear; 
then the chances are that in manhood he will 
have regard for the Golden Rule. 

Nearly all the confusion between capital and 
labor has had its counterpart in the child's ex- 
periences during the first ten years of his life. 
If his rights are ignored, why should he not 
show the same disregard for the rights of oth- 
ers? At first it shows itself in appropriating 
the things belonging to others, which grows 
into a general disrespect for others' rights, and 
an inability to appreciate what is due to them. 
It has been observed that children whose fam- 
ilies have been pauperized by the injudicious 
charity of churches and benevolent societies 
are generally not regardful of property rights. 
This does not necessarily arise from any inher- 



62 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

ent dishonesty,- it simply means that false kind- 
ness has prevented any sharp distinction be- 
tween mine and thine from getting a lodgment 
in their convictions, and they feel at liberty to 
appropriate whatever seems desirable without 
any very great consideration of the owners' 
wishes. Children who are not paupers fre- 
quently show this lack of training in other 
ways: — fences are marked, lawns trampled, 
and we look on with good natured indifference, 
failing to recognize that this small and appar- 
ently unimportant disregard of property rights 
is the nucleus of future oppression and strife. 
Later experience may lead him to a recognition 
of such of these principles as are necessary to 
success in business, but a real, genuine consid- 
eration for others must be taught in babyhood 
and preserved as a possession of inestimable 
value throughout the years of growth, if it shall 
become an ingredient of the character. 

Dr. G. Stanley Hall in his suggestive paper 
on "Children's Lies" gives an insight into this 
subject not realized before, and which every 
teacher of children should carefully study. It 
is true of all animals that they lie, so far as 
their intelligence permits, and man inherits his 



CHILDREN'S LIES. 63 

full share of this propensity, without the ani- 
mal's excuse that it is now necessary to his sur- 
vival. The instinct can be suppressed most 
easily in early childhood. 

In the animal world are seen many evidences 
of this instinct to deceive. Spiders feign 
death in times of danger, a habit followed by 
many small animals and insects. Birds resort 
to all sorts of tricks to divert an enemy's atten- 
tion from their nests; while the fox, the dog, 
and many others do their part in maintain- 
ing this characteristic whenever self-preserva- 
tion or interest renders it desirable or necessary. 
The little child, at first, lies as innocently as 
other animals, which of course is no lie in the 
moral sense of the word. 

Then the time comes when the imagination 
begins to bud, and some children find it hard to 
distinguish between what actually occurred and 
what he imagines occurred. And, too, there 
is that inability to relate occurrences accurately 
which is, in some degree, the effect of deficient 
sense training, and memory. A short time 
ago a daily paper gave an abstract of a lecture 
on lying in which the speaker deplored the "fa- 
tal tendency" of children to imitate and spoke 



64 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

at length of all their little games, such as keep- 
ing house, playing school, tending baby and the 
like, as the beginning of this sinful habit. De- 
luded soul, he failed to see that the whole race 
learns by imitation. The ability to imitate in- 
telligently has brought Japan to the front, while 
the inability to imitate keeps the barbarian bar- 
barous. 

If the hypothesis that man inherits a ten- 
dency to lie in common with other animals is 
excepted, then he must pass through this 
stage of race experience, as he does through his 
nomadic and robber stages. No danger need be 
felt for the normal child with proper training. 
It is the child who is arrested in this stage that 
becomes and remains a liar. Of course we all 
see the preventive. The child must live in an 
atmosphere of truthfulness. His gift of imita- 
tion enables him to follow what he sees, and 
this gradually crystallizes into habit, forming 
a good foundation for the ethical training of la- 
ter years. It is easy to preach to or nag a young 
child until he becomes either a hypocrite or a 
coward, or to punish so severely as to make him 
an accomplished liar. But few, if any, can with- 
stand the warm, sunny influence of a kind and 



SELFISHNESS. 65 

truthful home or school. There are times when 
it becomes necessary to punish falsehood ; but 
it is well to know first what is in the child's 
mind before doing it. A kind, sympathetic talk 
with him will often reveal ideas or deductions 
unsuspected by the adult mind, which show a 
conscience void of offense. Surely it is worth 
the trouble. 

On the other hand, many a young schemer 
is most artful in his attempts to deceive. It is 
most important that this type of child should 
not be allowed to escape the teachers' or the 
parents' vigilance. It is he that swells the 
mournful army of swindlers and defaulters 
found in the various avenues of business. 

We place many obstacles in the child's way. 
The deceptions of social and business life, 
the daily insincerities which the average person 
practices almost unconsciously, all these puzzle 
and bewilder the immature mind. Surely we 
who provide these conditions should be fair, 
and act as truthfully as we would have him do. 

SWINISHNESS. 

Selfishness in the young child is merely the 
instinct of self-preservation which he shares in 



66 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

common with other animals. At first it is per- 
fectly right and natural; he grows out of it 
gradually as the altruistic attributes of his na- 
ture and feelings of sympathy begin to assert 
themselves. Too strenuous and too early ef- 
forts to teach him generosity, self-denial, and 
the like, react dangerously later on. His at- 
tempts in this direction should be few and sim- 
ple, at first, and of such a nature as to give him 
pleasure. To illustrate: A short time ago a 
neighbor's little son reached his fifth birthday. 
An aunt sent him a small, heart-shaped box of 
bon-bons. In the afternoon a few friends 
called. "Pass your pretty candies to the ladies," 
said his mother, with the result that only two 
poor little gum drops were left in the box. Now 
don't you think this was a hard lesson for the 
average boy? His mother wished him to grow 
up a noble, unselfish man. What do you think 
of her methods ? Is she likely to succeed in her 
effort? 

The Christian religion sometimes requires us 
to give up all we hold dear ; but we rarely meet 
this demand cheerfully at five. The average 
child loves to share his possessions occasion- 
ally ; let him begin by doing so in small meas- 



FIGHTING. 67 

lire, at first — so small that his sense of loss or 
deprivation is counterbalanced by the sympa- 
thetic pleasure he feels — until the altruistic na- 
ture begins to assert itself. 

Fighting. 

Reference has been made to the instinct of 
self-preservation. This shows itself in various 
ways. At a very early age the child tries to 
defend himself, to protect his property, or to 
acquire something which instinct teaches him is 
desirable, and he does it by means of the only 
weapons known to him — his teeth, hands, and 
feet — he fights. Remember, he is yet only a 
little animal and seeks to preserve himself as 
other animals do. This is, therefore, a per- 
fectly normal effort in line with all the instincts 
which preserve animal life from extinction. The 
child must pass through this stage. Nations 
have not yet passed beyond it. If he is arrested 
in it he will go through life a brute. Repugnant 
as it may be to our feelings the child must be 
allowed this experience. It is necessary to his 
moral growth; it is the natural and healthy 
foundation of the mental and moral struggle 



68 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

which every man maintains if he prove suc- 
cessful in the battle of life. This period is 
passed more quickly by some temperaments 
than by others, but evidences of its existence 
are most noticeable in the third or fourth year 
of school life. 

Perhaps most of the nations do, or have 
done, their bitterest fighting at the time when 
the great majority of the people are or were in 
the same stage of intelligence as our aver- 
age boy of ten or twelve. The child at this 
age has a keen and somewhat poetic sense 
of justice. Loss must be compensated and 
wrong punished without delay. He is in the 
period of muscle training also, and at once pro- 
ceeds to set matters right in the only way that 
appeals to him. One reason that he appreciates 
Buffalo Bill stories and others of their kind so 
keenly is found in the swift and summary pun- 
ishment meted out to all offenders. The crude 
sense of justice depicted in this class of litera- 
ture coincides exactly with his own half-devel- 
oped ideas, and the lurid scenes of bravery and 
bloodshed do not seem exaggerated or impos- 
sible to his childish fancy because he lives in a 
world of imagination where the marvelous is 
always commonplace. 



FIGHTING. 69 

Fairy tales are absorbed eagerly at this age 
and earlier. Red Riding Hood is a great 
favorite with the child of six or eight, and 
his sigh of relief when the wicked wolf is 
dispatched is an unfailing indication of his 
sense of justice satisfied. Jack the Giant 
Killer answers the same need. It seems only 
logical to meet this craving with the best sto- 
ries of the races' great battles. Carthage and 
Rome will fascinate him, and the Old Testa- 
ment wars will appeal to him more strongly 
now than a few years later, for the reason that 
he is in about the same stage of spiritual devel- 
opment as the people of whom he is reading 
and is, therefore, ready to sympathize with 
them most keenly. 

Later on he will, of course, appreciate the 
grandeur and sublimity of the Old Testament, 
its lofty ideals, and noble purposes, in a man- 
ner and degree now impossible; but just now 
he takes this initial and most important step 
in his study of the Bible. He is learning to 
live it, to sympathize with it, to see the har- 
mony between its narrative and his own ex- 
perience. For this reason the child should read 
the Old Testament first, reserving the altru- 



7o THE POINT OF VIEW. 

istic teaching of the New Testament for the 
period of adolescence when the altruistic quali- 
ties become active. 

Reference to literature is made in this con- 
nection merely to show why the child prefers 
stories of conflict at this age. If this craving 
is indulged judiciously, and he is allowed to 
fight, when he believes he is fighting for jus- 
tice and right, he passes through this stage of 
development safely, and is stronger and more 
wholesome for the experience. It is well, per- 
haps, that nature asserts herself so vigorously 
in this matter that the average boy follows her 
promptings in spite of the maternal dictum that 
"no matter what happens, little son mustn't 

fight." 

After many years spent in the school room, 
the writer can recall but one instance in which 
a mother succeeded in enforcing this command 
literally and absolutely, and. is thankful that 
she can recall no more. The victim, when 
she first met him, was a boy of fourteen, 
very tall, well proportioned, with excellent fea- 
tures and good coloring, gentlemanly in man- 
ner, the pleasing effect of which was somewhat 
marred by a general limpness, both mental and 



FIGHTING. n 

physical, which was at once explained when, 
after some indignity offered by smaller boys, 
the mother explained, "My son is preparing 
for the ministry; no matter what the boys do 
to him, he cannot fight, he has never struck any- 
one in his life." In vain the teacher pleaded 
for a saner and more logical treatment. The 
result may be imagined. As the others 
learned the situation, George became the butt 
of the school. Every indignity was offered 
which ingenuity could invent, and at the close 
of each session he generally ran across thvS 
fields followed by a crowd of nimble tormen- 
ters. Years have passed and jGeorge is now a 
man, probably in the ministry, and it would 
be interesting to know how well the dignity of 
the church militant is maintained by one who 
was never allowed to assert and defend his 
own. 

Then, too, it must be remembered that boys 
do very much of their fighting simply to deter- 
mine which is the better man; they are living 
in the period of conquest. The principal of the 
Grand Rapids Ungraded School reports an al- 
most total cessation of street fights since the 
boys are allowed to box during the last fifteen 
to thirty minutes on Friday afternoon. 



72 THE POINT OF VIEW. 



VI. 

WHAT THE CHILD SHOULD LEARN. 

( Continued. ) 

It has already been suggested that for the 
good of the nation, as well as the individ- 
ual, children ought not to enter the school 
room before completing the eleventh year. It 
seems absurd to most readers to make a 
statement so directly opposed to the prevail- 
ing opinion. Emigration brings to our shores 
thousands of children whose first and only 
lessons in good citizenship are gained in 
the public schools during infancy or early child- 
hood ; then, there are other thousands of native 
born parents whose indifference, lack of prep- 
aration, of opportunity, or of money, renders 
them unfit or unable to assume the elementary 
education of their children. There is also the 
youthful army of bread-winners, whom stern 
necessity forces into our industrial life so 
early that they must attend school during 
childhood, if at all; and there, too, is the un- 
fortunate only child whose early experience 



EDUCATIONAL VALUES. 73 

in community life is gained almost entirely 
from the same source. Earnest and fair-minded 
parents entertain a wholesome fear of defects 
in education which may handicap their children 
in the "competitive examinations" which await 
them in every corner of the business world. 
It may be, therefore, that the contents of this 
chapter will be taken with many misgivings 
as to their common sense. Its suggestions 
must be modified and adapted to the environ- 
ment of each individual child, if they shall 
prove of any value. 

Ideal conditions surround the child when it 
feels the blessed influences of an intelligent and 
loving home. But these conditions are too sel- 
dom realized ; so it comes to pass that the pub- 
lic school with all its imperfections becomes the 
chief instrumentality in the moulding and 
leavening process which converts the embryo 
anarchist into a loyal citizen, and imparts hope 
and intelligence to that great mass of human- 
ity which, deprived of its influences, must live 
as the beast liveth. Most that can be done for 
the following generation is to come from con- 
sidering all the conditions. We must estimate 
even the defects at their true value, and then 



74 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

choose the best that each one's own peculiar 
circumstances render possible; remembering 
always that a blind adherence to any princi- 
ple, however good, often defeats the end 
sought. 

Since present public opinion requires chil- 
dren to attend school in their infancy, and since 
the average parent is not in a position to ignore 
this requirement without placing his children 
at great disadvantage, it follows that all de- 
sired change in the process of educating the 
young must be brought about by degrees. 

Under present conditions the child is almost 
exclusively dominated by the feminine mind, 
and as this state of things will, in all probabil- 
ity, continue for some years, it becomes 
woman's duty to fit herself for the task. Moth- 
erhood will take on a higher anda'holier signifi- 
cance as women learn better how to study 
their children from the standpoint of science 
as well as of sentiment. Sentiment is, of course, 
a most important factor in child training, but 
he who trusts to it entirely may be likened to a 
builder who fashions his structure without 
foundation or scaffolding. 



EDUCATIONAL VALUES. 75 

An accurate knowledge of conditions and a 
true estimate of educational values are the 
greatest needs of the average woman. Without 
them we fail to recognize the relations of the 
part to the whole, and thus many a fundamental 
principle is ignored, many a defect disregarded, 
because its importance to the perfection of the 
structure is never suspected. 

Take for illustration the universal in- 
stinct of children to destroy — a disposition 
prominently active at a certain stage of growth. 
It has its place and value, but must in a short 
time give place to another impulse. Failure to 
understand that this is a mere animal impulse 
is the. cause of the unrestrained destruction of 
trees and shrubs, the mutilation of fences and 
buildings, long after this natural instinct 
should have been arrested. The American is a 
good natured soul, and sometimes too good- 
natured. The damage may be trifling. "Boys 
will be boys" parents say. They are indiffer- 
ent, or ashamed to complain since popular sen- 
timent is with the offender; so the child goes 
on his way, and no one seems to connect the ut- 
ter disregard of life and property in later 
life with the pernicious, unchecked habit of 
child life. 



76 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

Take another illustration. At five o'clock 
all street cars are crowded. A mother enters 
with a child for whom no fare will be paid, 
5t being under age; the car becomes filled 
to overflowing, but the child retains its seat 
while some old person, perhaps, paying full 
fare is obliged to stand. Who can say that this 
may not be the first lesson in a long course of 
training which eventually produces the bank 
defaulter, or the cool, merciless speculator in 
the necessities of life? Would this mother so 
manifest her selfishness were she trained to see 
the connection between the numberless petty 
dishonesties of daily life, and the keen, system- 
atic dishonesty which is practiced later? "It 
is the little foxes that spoil the vines." 

We send the child to the kindergarten at 
four or five, and make the usual transition to 
the primary room later. What the active young 
body suffers from this "promotion" the adult 
does not appreciate. Seated before a desk, de- 
prived of natural unrestrained freedom, he is 
suddenly put to the study of objects much 
smaller than anything previously considered by 
him. Letters, figures, alphabet cards, and the 
type of the ordinary reader are a severe tax 



NUMBER WORK. 77 

upon the strength and nervous energy of the 
little fellow whose eyes, unaccustomed through 
thousands of years of ancestral life to such ex- 
ercise are now adapting their lenses slowly 
(few realize how slowly) to the requirements 
of civilized man. The great prevalence of 
diseases of the eyes among school children in 
later generations has a close connection with 
the too rapid adaptation of the "muscles of 
accommodation" to the work of the school. 

Some of the present generation escape much 
of the senseless thralldom of our last two or 
three generations, for we are slowly growing 
in knowledge. 

The educational value placed upon the study 
of numbers by the average school is out of all 
proportion to its real worth. True the "devel- 
opment" of the number two in the "baby 
class" was no longer continued after the fact 
was discovered that a canary bird knows the 
difference between one lump of sugar and two, 
and that the same remarkable perspicuity was 
observed in the case of young puppies. Some 
reckless individual, unknown to fame, hazarded 
the opinion tha£ the number two is known to 
the child before he enters school. This settled 



78 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

it. Hereafter school work might begin with 
"three." We are still giving the child much 
that would come to him naturally if he were 
allowed to wait until his mind was ready for it. 
Aye, there's the rub, — "when the mind is 
ready." Children must be kept of! the street 
five or six hours out of twenty-four. To do this 
we must keep them busy. 

The educational possibilities of manual 
work and of gardening are known to but few 
even of the educators. Their equipment costs 
some money it is true, but not so much is 
needed as some localities expend. The study 
of arithmetic has a commercial value in the 
eyes of the father — who earns two dol- 
lars a day and has six children who must 
early learn the secret of "getting on in the 
world" — which surpasses that of manual train- 
ing. Will money-making always compel us 
to tear the bud open before it is ready to 
bloom ? What the little learner needs is to see 
the relations between things before he deals 
with ideas. Let him play (or work) with 
blocks until he knows beyond all possibility of 
doubt how one-third or one-fifth of a thing 
compares in size with the whole thing. Let 



NUMBER WORK. 79 

him learn this through the experiences of sight 
and touch, and a little later his mind will grasp 
the various combinations of numbers with a 
freedom and power unknown to the child who 
has juggled with figures until he is already a 
mental dyspeptic. 

But we are forgetting that "seventy-five per 
cent of our pupils leave school at the comple- 
tion of the fourth grade." Not so many as 
that, but many. Yet the gamin, or the beggar 
understands number to the extent of his neces- 
sity, which is often far beyond the attainments 
of the school-boy. What the child really needs 
is to feel that number, though abstract in itself, 
is connected with all the material things of 
life. So too of language; the sentence, or 
clause, or connective, whose dead form he sees 
laid out, as if for burial, on the pages of his 
grammar, lives and moves and has its being in 
the thought and feeling of the warm, pulsing 
myriads of human beings around him. These 
studies seem dry and hard because we give 
them to the child before they enter into his ex- 
perience. We may sugar-coat them with at- 
tractive devices and colored chalk but, nine 
times out of ten, he is interested more in the 



80 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

novelty or play of colors, than in the mathe- 
matical or grammatical facts they teach. 
Sometimes the child spends his time in class 
not in the search for truth so much as in trying 
to discover what his teacher would have him 
say. That is, he learns to follow the workings 
of her mind rather than to develop the power 
of independent thought. This is not the best 
occupation for a human soul. It is, however, 
an excellent training for a puppet who is to 
spend its life either in the treadmill of fashion- 
able society, or imprisoned in the shop or the 
factory. It is not expected that a machine 
shall think. 

Parents often complain that their children 
are "so dreamy" in school. We never get 
nearer to heaven than in our day-dreams. 
They lift us from the material to the real ; they 
perfume the lump of clay ; they imbue the clod 
with life ; they transform the cell into a palace ; 
they expand the powers of the soul. In prepar- 
ing the child for future bondage, if we must, 
let us spare him the one gift that testifies to his 
immortal lineage. 

We are told that the public school does what 
it is created to do when it trains the masses 



EXPRESSION. 8 1 

for useful and honorable citizenship by teach- 
ing them reading, writing, and arithmetic. It 
works for uniformity and exactness; it turns 
out good book-keepers, alert tradesmen, care- 
ful workmen. It is for the average child, not 
the genius. (How would Shakespeare have 
come through the treadmill of a public school ? 
Probably he would have run away. Truancy 
is not always crime.) 

The private school is often sought as a relief 
from this too severe training, and it is apt to 
fall into the other extreme. School training, like 
every other predetermined course of procedure, 
has its Scylla and Charybdis. It is the fate of 
nearly every virtue that it has its corresponding 
vice, into which it may degenerate when the 
part is mistaken for the whole. Formerly it 
was thought that the commanding function of 
the school was the gaining of information. To 
know the mechanics of knowledge, — the pro- 
cesses in arithmetic, the use of script letters in 
writing, the ready pronunciation of the words 
in reading — was the first thing to be taught, 
and these were then to be used during the re- 
mainder of the child's school days in gaining 
the knowledge embodied in the text-books. 



82 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

Fill up the mind in school, as you would fill a 
store-house with grain, to be used later as the 
exigencies of life shall require. Nor has this 
primitive notion gone out of the convictions of 
men. 

But modern education is declaring that the 
first and last purpose of systematic instruction 
in school is expression. 

Since, then, expression is the business of life, 
cultivation of the means of expression becomes 
imperative. The artisan who best expresses 
his thought in a bit of wood or metal is the 
most successful. This is true of the artist with 
his brush or of the writer with his pen ; in fact it 
holds good in any of the seven modes of expres- 
sion employed by man. The highest mode is 
language, spoken or written. The ability to 
communicate with one's fellow, is, perhaps, 
man's greatest gift, and when it is considered 
that, at first, a few sounds expressive of hun- 
ger, cold, satisfaction, and the like, comprised 
his entire vocabulary, that no word was ever 
formed or used by him until some need or 
emotion forced its utterance, we will begin to 
understand that language grows as the soul 
grows, and that no one is prompted to speak or 



EXPRESSION. 83 

write until he has something to say. If this be 
true it would follow logically that no child 
should be expected to talk or write except un- 
der the impulse of interest. 

If language is the expression of thought, 
then one cannot exist without the other, and 
each must, in turn, react upon and develop its 
complement; so the child must be given sub- 
jects of interest to him in his life rather than 
ours, and he will then express himself readily 
enough. 

We must remember that man talked a long 
time before he began to write. The child fol- 
lows to some degree the order of development 
of the race. The average city child or, at 
least, the average city boy, possesses three lan- 
guages — that of the home, of the street, and a 
third, a restricted and stilted tongue by which 
he tries to give utterance to what he thinks the 
teacher wishes him to say, and from which he 
seldom lapses in her presence save when some 
emotion surprises him into naturalness. It is 
generally conceded that the structure of the 
child's language is fixed during his earliest 
years; some going so far as to say that his 
forms of speech are fixed before he is five years 



84 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

old. Of course, in doing this he imitates 
the language he hears. No other course is 
possible to him. Perhaps this is the reason 
why people of wealth and refinement place 
their children in the care of nurse maids who, 
generally speaking, are unable to construct an 
English sentence correctly! We are fond of 
saying that the age of fetish worship is long 
past, but the fetish is still with us. This must 
be so, else we could not permit the child to 
form the most careless habits of speech, and 
then place him in the charmed atmosphere of 
the school room, resting in the belief that the 
teacher with her educational sponge can wipe 
off all the indelible impressions that habit 
and environment have graven with a pen of 
iron upon the infant mind. 

Alcott says "Man does only what he 
chooses." It is equally true that man always 
lives up to what he really believes. It is a 
question whether he can ever lie to himself, 
however much he may try to do so. If, for in- 
stance, you and I really believed that certain 
early influences made or marred the child's fu- 
ture usefulness to such a degree that all later 
effort could only modify, never entirely eradi- 



IMITATION. 85 

cate the evil, that the wounds when healed left 
a most ugly scar, would we dream of submit- 
ting the child to conditions we now regard 
with indifference simply because we entertain 
the erroneous idea that the young mind is a 
slate from which all habits may be washed at 
will? 

It has been already suggested that imitation 
is a powerful factor in education. Few per- 
sons, if any, learn to speak correctly through 
a study of grammatical rules. They are valu- 
able as a preliminary exercise in logic, as an 
aid to acquiring a foreign language, or in set- 
tling knotty questions in the construction of 
one's own ; but the child speaks what he hears. 
If he is surrounded by cultivated people their 
speech is his by imitation, and this is equally 
true when the conditions are reversed. People 
who have read and studied very little will speak 
and write with habitual correctness and ele- 
gance if they have always enjoyed the society 
of good models, and it is only when some un- 
usual and rare construction comes up that their 
ignorance of syntax becomes apparent. Of 
course, any young child is apt at first to say 
"I done," or "It is broke," or "I seen," etc., 



S6 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

but if pains are taken to make him use the cor- 
rect forms a few times each day, he will soon 
employ them habitually ; not because he knows 
any reason for doing so, but simply because 
his memory will remind his tongue and by and 
by he learns to speak correctly as he would 
learn a tune. Imitation, training, habit — these 
seem to be the whole secret of early language 
training, and many teachers make note of the 
most objectionable errors of their pupils and 
give frequent practice in the correct forms. 

This is particularly effective in treating the 
mistakes peculiar to the locality. Suppose, for 
example, that the children in a district are ac- 
customed to say "trun" for thrown; the sim- 
ple devices of leading the pupils to make up lit- 
tle stories, employing the correct forms of these 
words, using only the odd moments when one 
is waiting for the recess, or the class gong, has 
an educational value that cannot be estimated. 
In time the exercises may be so varied and so 
skillfully conducted as to modify the speech of 
an entire neighborhood. 

Then, too, there is the influence of good liter- 
ature which awakens a lively interest. A child 
can read and appreciate a book, which one 



READING. 87 

would think far beyond his attainments, pro- 
vided the matter interests him. The fact that 
he does not know many of the words does not 
seem to deaden the interest nor to mar the ef- 
fect upon his language, and as he grows older 
these words return to him with their true 
meaning, particularly if he is allowed to read 
the same book many times. Without doubt 
many children do too much desultory reading 
at too early an age. There is a time when this 
is necessary, but until he is well on toward his 
teens it would seem better to read and re-read 
a few books thoroughly than to swallow like a 
cormorant many books, though they may be 
good literature. It is well to give him early a 
few good models with which to lay the founda- 
tion of his language. Later he reads omniv- 
orously, not for structure, but for information. 
The two processes should never be confounded 
or one mistaken for the other. (This opinion, 
however, is controverted by many excellent 
teachers. ) 

It is a common error to explain every word 
the child reads. If assistance is given, it 
should only be that which will bring the child 
into sympathetic touch with what he is read- 



88 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

ing. Suppose, for instance, he has Whittier's 
Snowbound — any narrative or incident show- 
ing the severity of a New England winter, the 
depth of a fall of snow in that locality, the 
simple comfort and family joys of old-fash- 
ioned country life, would be in order. It is of 
no consequence whether he can or cannot spell 
and define all the words in the poem or draw a 
correct copy of the andirons, or produce a sil- 
houette of the cat generally found in the illus- 
tration on a certain page. What shall it profit 
a child if he learns the whole poem by heart un- 
less he understands and is in harmony with the 
environment of the scene; unless the beauty 
of its picture pervades and enlarges his mental 
vision and arouses his sympathy? 

The mission of good literature is just this, 
and if, by any means, he fails to catch its real 
lesson, then he may gain an abundance of 
ideas and facts but miss the growth and expan- 
sion of soul which is the real object of all good 
literature. So let the child brood over a few 
good books if he will, never meddling or help- 
ing except in the way indicated, and not doing 
this unnecessarily. He will be stronger and 
better for this silent uninterrupted communion 



COMPOSITION. 89 

with his book or, rather, with the people he 
comes to know there. There is an old adage : 
"Beware of the man of one book." Oliver 
Cromwell was one of these men of one book. 
His was the Bible, and he gave liberty of con- 
science to England. 

The root of a plant grows in the darkness; 
the process of development is not carried on be- 
fore the curious eye. What would happen if 
the plant were dug up occasionally that we 
might note the increasing length of the fibres, 
or, better still,, that we might watch them 
grow ? We seem to understand plant life better 
than our own. 

The child must write, the school says, write 
unceasingly, whether he has anything to write 
about or not. But a wiser injunction is, "First 
the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn 
in the ear." "First the ear," the school says; 
no wonder that the full corn is lacking. 

Man took ages to develop oral speech. The 
little child should do an immense amount of 
talking before he begins to express himself in 
writing. This is the time in which the ear should 
be cultivated — something almost forgotten in 
the school. The young writer cannot give 

—7 



90 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

attention to form at the same moment that he 
is supposed to be writing from impulse. He 
cannot kindle the celestial fire and while it 
burns write to margin with ink and pen and 
dot his i's and cross his t's and slant all his let- 
ters according to rule. Look at the manu- 
scripts of our famous authors; not all were 
able to attain excellence in mechanical form 
while burning with great thoughts. But some 
seem to think the child must do all this from 
the start, when both form and substance are 
new to him. 

This idea is hoary with age, but modern 
methods are better. They recognize that di- 
vided attention by young children is fatal to 
progress. From the child's experience in learn- 
ing to talk, we should direct his experience in 
learning to write. He learns to talk by practice 
in talking; he must learn to write by practice 
in writing. In writing — by which is meant 
graphic expression of thought — the child's at- 
tention must be held to what he wishes to say 
and the hand must obey the impulse of the 
mind, as the tongue obeys the impulse of the 
mind in learning to talk. The child would 
never learn to talk by first making a phonic 



COMPOSITION. 91 

synthesis of each word. In writing he simply 
draws the form of the word that is in his mind. 
It may lack some letters and other things, but 
the muscles of his fingers draw it as the muscles 
of his vocal organs formed his first words — by 
imitation. Drill in perfecting this form is a 
separate school exercise, not to be confused with 
writing, any more than a phonic drill is to be 
confused with talking. Soft, unsized paper, a 
lead pencil not too short, nor too hard, and well 
sharpened, are needed to lure the youthful tyro 
into this avenue of expression. Later the rocks 
and sharp stones will not appear so formidable ; 
but at first he should see only the smooth, in- 
viting sand. Oddly enough this figure carries 
one back to primitive times when children 
in many a dame's school took their first 
writing lesson in large boxes of fine sand. The 
characters they made were large and did not 
strain the eye, but cultivated the necessary free- 
dom of the arm. "How crude," we say, yet we 
have nothing today that satisfactorily takes the 
place of that obsolete box of sand. Children 
love to write in this way. Perhaps our early 
ancestors did the same in the first stages of this 
art, and the child thus repeats the experiences 
of the race. 



92 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

Time was, also, when our forefathers gained 
from myths their first noions of justice, truth, 
and honor. Vague, imaginative, living close 
to nature, their dawning emotions could find 
utterance in no other channel. All that the race 
felt of love and virtue was transmitted in 
this way. The little child must travel the same 
road. Why not allow him to ride in the same 
easy, comfortable conveyance that the young of 
all ages have been carried in? Later he must 
walk, of course, but he will be stronger because 
of the myth and fairy tale. His crude ideas of 
justice are satisfied when the wicked giant or 
the cruel witch is punished, when the good king 
is rewarded, or the fair maiden restored to her 
friends. 

Suppose the child could start in life from 
our commercial point of view, what would he 
be when a man ? Hard and dry as a nut, with- 
out imagination, enthusiasm or ideals. Heaven 
preserve the child's soul from an exclusive diet 
of facts. He needs facts to be sure, but he 
needs ideals and images of beauty to direct the 
use of his facts. One cannot tie the mind to a 
little circuit of facts, as he would tether a cow, 
and escape Gradgrind's disaster. Such treat- 



LITERATURE. 93 

ment is proper for the cow, but not for a 
growing, aspiring human soul. Then give him 
the beautiful myths he loves; let him love 
Santa Claus. His childish heart will respond 
to all these pictures of nobleness and sacrifice. 
Later they fade away and are relegated to the 
background as pretty fancies, perhaps, but 
their impressions remain. He has grown out 
of them, cast them aside, but, like the rudiment- 
ary organs of the body, they form the founda- 
tions upon which his present ideas of justice 
and virtue are built. As the tadpole, deprived 
of its tail, fails as a frog to develop the hind 
legs, so surely does a human soul deprived of 
the nourishment proper to each period, fail in 
realizing his own native possibilities. 

One does not feed a babe on meat. The 
Old Testament teachers understood this fact. 
It is probable that their pupils did not cavil 
about the size of the whale's throat, or ques- 
tion whether or not the sun could stand still. 
The thought of God's love was brought home 
in a way that would best appeal to them in 
their stage of development. Perhaps they un- 
derstood the figurative language of the East 
better than we, but the lesson was taught, the 



94 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

truth implanted. We in a more advanced age 
may criticise as we will the means used; but 
the impression was made, its vehicle has per- 
formed its task as no other could in that time 
and age. All along the road the child gives 
outward and visible signs of this repetition of 
his race's experience, in his occupations; his 
games ; his reading ; his interest in bead work, 
weaving, basketry, and pottery; and his desire 
to learn of primitive peoples. 

Later in the fifth to seventh grades, there are 
reasons why he does not like to sing. There is, 
of course, change of voice in boys with its ac- 
companying self-consciousness; but greater 
than all is the fact that he does not get the right 
kind of songs. He is in the soldier stage and 
craves martial music. Try a boy with chang- 
ing voice on whistling popular airs. Cultivate 
rhythm, by the use of the bones, drum, clappers 
to accompany the piano. This craving for 
rhythm sends our boy to clog dances. 

After change of voice the boy who sang air 
is suddenly dropped to the harmony and, at the 
same time, to the adjustment of a strange 
voice. Songs in unison should therefore be 
alternated with harmonized melodies. There 



MUSIC. 95 

is right here a comparatively untried field for 
composers in the setting of songs that will 
give the boy-tenors and basses the melody, 
while the soprano and alto voices take the har- 
mony. 



96 THE POINT OF VIEW. 



VII. 

INFLUENCES. 

'"T^HE fundamental aim in all education is 
-■■ the realization of true family life. The civ- 
ilization of every people is measured by 
this standard. Human greatness has its rise in 
the home. No man has ever attained distinc- 
tion in any field of thought or industry whose 
early years have not been blessed with some 
enjoyment of home life. He may have been an 
orphan or been born in poverty, but some ex- 
perience of home has crept into his lonely life. 
If man sprang into existence full grown, ready 
for all the emergencies and experiences of life, 
there would be no family ties; the joys and 
griefs and discipline of parenthood and child- 
hood would be unknown. All the loving care, 
the self-sacrifice, the forbearance, which have 
been slowly evolved through the long, long 
evolution of the race, would be unknown, and 
we would have no more sense of kindred than 



INFLUENCES. 97 

a chicken or a cat. The intelligence of animals 
is in proportion to the length of their infancy. 
Man, the highest type of animal, is the most 
helpless of all creatures at birth. The ever in- 
creasing experiences of each generation send 
each succeeding man into the world with a 
larger number of brain cells. The greater the 
number of these, the longer he remains an in- 
fant. If it were possible for man to materially 
shorten his period of infancy the result would 
not be so beneficial as he sometimes imagines. 
The two great necessities of the home are 
love and a certain degree of seclusion or ex- 
clusiveness. A too public life dissipates the 
affections. To love God and one's neighbor 
requires frequent and close communion. Man 
is not prepared for either until he has learned 
the alphabet of love in the home, where he mas- 
ters it a few letters at a time. A may be a little 
poodle, B a ragged doll ; each succeeding letter 
will mark a higher experience. Formerly man's 
safety depended upon the seclusion of his 
home, and now that he has passed beyond the 
need of mere physical protection the growing 
soul demands a similar seclusion. The young 
child suffers from too early exposure. The 



98 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

boarding house and the restaurant work seri- 
ous injury to him. The removal of the front 
fence, insignificant as it seems, is performing 
its part in destroying the home feeling, for 
now a seat upon the front porch means partici- 
pation in the life of the street. The flat, the 
hotel, and the restaurant are blessings to those 
for whom they were originally intended; but 
the little child does not gain there that sense of 
personal responsibility and of loving sympathy, 
nor experience the thousand little homely joys 
and privileges which may be his in the humblest 
cottage. These public houses have an expan- 
siveness, a sense of publicity, to which the 
young child should not be compelled to adapt 
himself. Even the adult needs repeated with- 
drawal into the privacy of the home. 

Everything that tends to multiply the simple 
joys of family life is distinctively educative 
and helpful. The Christmas Tree and the birth- 
day cake do more than the spelling book to 
make the child a useful, happy man; not that 
we love the speller less, but the child more. 
The whole subject resolves itself into a ques- 
tion of values. Education means the ability to 
estimate truly the great and small things of 



INFLUENCES. 99 

life, to note the connection of each to the whole 
and to place each in its proper relations. 

The good, hot, Sunday dinner eaten by the 
poor laborer in his own kitchen, in the society 
of wife and children, is distinctively educative. 
Perhaps this is a materialistic view, but we 
must pass through the lower into the higher, 
for this is the law of growth. "If man love 
not his brother whom he hath seen, how can 
he love God whom he hath not seen?" 

It follows, then, that the home should be a 
place of rest, of repose, of love. Handsome 
rooms are not needed, in fact, walls covered 
with pictures, and shelves with bric-a-brac are 
often a distinctive drawback to spiritual and 
mental growth, the general impression being 
that of confusion. Simple, homely comfort 
seems to be the better influence; a pretty bed- 
room to which friends may be invited may keep 
the boy from wandering, while an open grate 
fire and a comfortable arm chair often have the 
same influence upon the father. Some years 
ago a certain old theatre in New York was es- 
pecially popular with business and professional 
men. Neither the plays nor the settings were 
better than those of other houses, yet men could 



ioo THE POINT OF VIEW. 

attend there when too tired or too dull to go 
elsewhere. At length the house was remodeled 
and then the charm was gone. A certain 
length of seat had afforded a peculiarly com- 
fortable rest for the long thigh bone ; this had 
proved the irresistible attraction. Perhaps 
builders of churches would do well to heed the 
suggestion. 

Fox terriers are prone to seek different 
homes; it is a characteristic of the breed. A 
friend of mine remarked that hers had never 
done so and probably never would. "How do 
you manage?" asked one. "It's easy," she re- 
plied, "I try to make him very welcome when 
he comes back from an outing." The kindly 
pat on the head, and "Good old doggie" from 
each member of the family always awaited 
him, and he knew it. Human animals are 
amenable to the same influences. 

One can never estimate fully the effect of 
environment. For example, how would 
"Snowbound" have gotten itself written in a 
modern flat with all the appliances of steam 
and electricity? And this leads me to repeat 
what I have said before — that we are not al- 
ways mindful of the difficulties young people 



INFLUENCES. 101 

sometimes encounter in their study of litera- 
ture. Many a boy in the eighth grade to-day 
has never seen a shepherd, or a genuine old 
fire-place; many more are growing up who 
have never seen a lamp. Can mere verbal ref- 
erence to these things recall to them the same 
picture that comes to you and to me? This is 
a world of change. In another century the 
child may find similar difficulty in understand- 
ing an allusion to the horse and buggy. 

Fun is essential to a happy home or a good 
school. Few situations exist in the ordinary 
routine of daily life that do not present some 
element of humor, and the child should be en- 
couraged to look for this. Muddy coffee and 
tough steak for breakfast are not especially 
appetizing or agreeable, but it is not always 
possible to avoid them; while a good hearty 
laugh may render their assimilation easier. 
Habitual cheerfulness is spontaneous only in 
perfect health, but the confirmed invalid may 
attain unto it 2 for it is contagious. The most 
dejected and wretched of human beings are 
made less wretched by the effort to be cheerful. 
It is often wise to assume a gentle courtesy 
and good nature that are not spontaneous. The 



102 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

form stimulates the growth of the virtue, ex- 
cept in hypocrites. Every well-meaning effort 
to be cheerful promotes the growth of cheer- 
fulness. The virtue grows by what it feeds 
upon. 

Christian philosophy differs fundamentally 
from that of Herbert Spencer, but the church 
owes him a debt of gratitude, in that he has 
helped to show that man cannot be educated in 
sections. Nor are the three R's deemed suffi- 
cient for the most meager preparation for liv- 
ing; the school is now interested in the three 
H's — head, heart, and hand. The visible re- 
sult is the present strong trend toward all 
kind of training for the hand, and toward 
music, literature, and good behavior for the 
heart. This is the most notable mark of mod- 
ern education. 

UNION OF SCHOOL AND HOME. 

When once this co-operation fairly sets in 
there will be an improvement in the education 
of children beyond the realization of our fond- 
est dreams. Mothers will then regard their 
children from the standpoint of science as well 
as from that of sentiment. It will then be seen 



INFLUENCES. 103 

that the suffering children are not found exclu- 
sively among the very poor. The power of 
self-control now sadly lacking in the present 
generation, will be regained when we begin to 
realize that concentration must begin in the 
home in early childhood. It cannot exist in an 
atmosphere of excitement and unrest. The 
child who has a superabundance of toys and 
books, who goes everywhere and is constantly 
on the alert for some new pleasure, cannot 
learn it. This power comes slowly, a certain 
degree of repose being necessary to its growth. 
The present facilities for rapid transit, the tele- 
phone and many other inventions so conducive 
to our comfort and convenience, encourage a 
diversity of activity and experience not favor- 
able to repose. We cannot get away from 
them, but their influence may be greatly modi- 
fied when parent and teacher shall study such 
problems together. The young child is incapa- 
ble of concentrating its attention for long, 
but that ability increases with judicious exer- 
cise. The simple life and daily recurring duties 
of the homes of the first half of the last century 
were more favorable to this needed repose. 



104 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

Intelligent experiment in the nursery will do 
much to aid the primary teacher in determin- 
ing the length and character of her various exer- 
cises, and will emphasize the necessity for more 
frequent rest periods; while the mother who 
now complains that her eight-year-old daughter 
''lacks concentration" will know that this power 
must be nurtured in the home before the child 
enters school, and that even under the most 
favorable conditions not much can be expected. 
Few of us see the child as he really is. This is 
particularly true of the boy whom one mother 
regards as a sort of athletic girl, while the 
mother of high ideals and sensitive tempera- 
ment often does him incalculable injury by her 
analytic, anxious study of his physical and 
moral symptoms. The boy is bathed, washed, 
dosed, read to, dissected, lectured and prayed 
with until he becomes a canting little hypocrite, 
a callous young sinner, or a morbid, shrinking, 
over-conscientious creature with small realiza- 
tion of his birthright of a happy wholesome 
childhood. No one needs Divine guidance more 
than the teacher, but we ought to study God's 
plan as set forth in his works. We might im- 
prove our definition of prayer. Emerson would 
help us. 



INFLUENCES. 105 

The school is apt to expend its energy in 
teaching abstract knowledge. What the child 
thus acquires, he sees through a glass darkly. 
His great, perhaps greatest, school need is 
wholesome, interesting occupation for hours 
out of school. A few flower seeds, some bits of 
wood and a set of carving tools, a chest of car- 
penters' tools may save him from perdition, if 
they come at the right time. We wait too long 
— until after he has formed other tastes. A 
child in the second or third grade is interested 
in growing flowers, in carrying soil in his cart, 
in gathering bits of paper on the lawn with his 
broom handle, into the end of which he has 
driven a long nail for a spike — anything, in 
fact, which will employ his restless muscles in 
useful ways, and these interests continue with- 
out flagging through the fourth grade ; but in 
the fifth grade there is a change. Pupils here 
show little interest in these occupations unless 
they have already learned to love them, and in 
the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades they look 
with a sort of elevated toleration upon those 
who seem to like this sort of thing. They have 
acquired other tastes. 

-8 



106 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

The inability to employ leisure moments to 
advantage pervades all classes of society. It 
impels the rich to all manner of excesses, while 
the poor take to the saloon or the street corner. 
Both classes are suffering the punishment of 
empty-mindedness. Some years ago a prosper- 
ous Australian city became able to pay its work- 
ing men better wages. Certain business firms 
made it easy for their employes to support their 
families comfortably by working but little more 
than half a day. The released laborer took to 
drink, became idle, quarrelsome, and obnox- 
ious ; the women, too, grew discontented. They 
neglected their homes, complained of their large 
families, and tried to imitate the selfish idleness 
of the wealthier classes. They followed the 
only course open to them. It is probable that 
this experience would be repeated in every city 
in many individual cases. 

Every child loves to do something; let us 
make that something educative. Some will 
collect insects or gather fossils and beautiful 
stones, while others are interested in the habits 
of fish or birds. Noted naturalists have been 
created in this way, and a man whom we all 
know has become eminent through a collection 



INFLUENCES. 107 

of weeds which he commenced in early boy- 
hood. No outlay of money is needed for this 
sort of work; in fact, interest generally de- 
clines in the ratio that expensive outfits are pro- 
vided. The chief requirement is a wise and 
sympathetic mother and teacher, not afraid of 
toads and snakes; one who says little but 
helps much ; one who does not show displeas- 
ure at a little dirt and can, if necessary, assist 
the boy in his various undertakings. Agas- 
siz's mother helped him dig the receptacles for 
the fish he so loved, and this community of in- 
terest in his early childhood formed a tie which 
lasted during life. Who can say how much of 
future greatness has had its rise in this whole- 
some companionship and direction of early 
childhood ? 

It is suggested above that a simple outfit, 
that meets all requirements, is better than a 
more elaborate one. A boy likes something 
that he has made or provided for himself, some- 
thing he is not afraid of spoiling. A common 
glass fruit jar makes a fine aquarium, and 
much is gained if he is invited to bring his 
treasure to school as an adornment for the win- 
dow sill. It is here that the home and the 



1 08 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

school have much in common; a judicious 
hint from the mother may be followed by en- 
couragement of some particular taste which 
needed only this influence to develop and 
strengthen it, while the teacher, in her turn, 
may be able to make many valuable suggestions 
from her point of view. The child at school is 
generally a far different being from the child 
at home — often better, sometimes worse — but 
he is rarely the same in both places. This dual 
existence is a distressing fact, seldom under- 
stood, but it suggests a fruitful field of study. 
Another advantage of this co-operation is 
the change of views and opinions that is sure 
to result on both sides. Children often evince 
interests and tendencies which seem evidences 
of unusual talent to the eyes of maternal affec- 
tion, but when the child works daily with 
thirty or forty others of the same age, in the 
same environment, many an intelligent mother 
has been surprised to find that the darling who 
appeared so brilliant at home is not the star of 
his class but is merely a good average. Nothing 
is so helpful in correcting false impressions of 
this kind as comparison, and a kind-hearted 
teacher can offer many helpful suggestions. 



INFLUENCES. 109 

This is particularly true when she is asked (as 
she often is) to name the child's leading ten- 
dency or interest, or to state what she thinks 
the child will be best fitted for when a man. 
This is always a hard question for the conscien- 
tious teacher. Only tact and perfect truthful- 
ness will keep her in the right path. Few 
children show strongly marked and continuous 
tastes in early childhood. They generally 
evince a variety of tendencies, a desire to flit 
from one interest to another. This is perfectly 
normal as this is the period of budding inter- 
ests, and only a strong and constantly recurring 
interest should be taken seriously. 

Then there is the period of puberty when 
lassitude makes physical exertion painful. The 
boy may find in books the path of least resist- 
ance. His physical condition is mistaken for 
an awakened love of study. We think our hero 
entering upon a professional career, when, in 
fact, his body is developing so fast that he has 
no energy for the voluntary muscles. 

Parents who have grown weary with toil 
look up to professional life as an opportunity 
for elegant leisure, and they insist upon thrust- 
ing their children into it without regard to 



no THE POINT OF VIEW. 

their fitness or choice. This sort of thing 
will continue until all classes of society form 
truer ideals. It is vain to talk of the dignity 
of menial toil, so long as wealth continues in- 
solent and overbearing toward the toiler. No 
one is so quick to see the real estimate placed 
upon labor as the laborer himself. If he is 
ignorant he accepts the standard which money 
sets up. If intelligent, he protests and is un- 
happy. His family strives to follow the lead 
of wealth in its expenditures, with the result 
that his expenses exceed his income, thus ren- 
dering life false to its very core. 

There is a wide difference between drudgery 
and intelligent labor — labor with brains behind 
it. Many people whose lives are spent in a 
nerve-wrecking struggle to appear what they 
are not, would be glad to live plainly and simply 
within their incomes if they could only know 
that inexpensive raiment, and an unfashionable 
domicile did not consign their children and 
themselves to social oblivion ; that culture and 
intelligence do not count. Many a young 
woman would exchange the comfortless factory 
or merchant's counter for a cosy kitchen, if she 
could feel that the brain power put into scien- 



INFLUENCES. 1 1 1 

tific house-work was respected equally with 
that which writes books or conducts a busi- 
ness. 

Co-operative study of parents and teachers 
will emphasize the necessity of independent 
effort on the part of the child, and of drill to 
secure facility. 

By a wrong use of this developing method 
of teaching, the inductive method has been 
misapplied, until the average child waits to 
have his work done for him; I mean the 
work that he should do for himself. The 
joy of conquest is rarely his. This is a great 
wrong, for the normally developed child loves 
to wrestle, mentally as well as physically, and 
one of the keenest and most wholesome pleas- 
ures he can ever know is the satisfaction that 
always follows a conflict in which he has come 
off victor. Two-thirds of the fighting in which 
boys indulge is for the purpose of deciding 
superiority in courage, or strength, or skill. 
Tact can turn this desire for conquest into the 
field of mental effort, and the boy will gain 
pleasure in fighting the problems he meets in 
his daily work. How can he better learn to 
fi^ht his own besetting sins than by the persist- 



1 1 2 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

ent exercise of a self-initiative in mastering his 
tasks ? 

Then, too, we love to do that which we can 
do well. It may be that no one engages in 
work of any kind merely for the pleasure of 
the work, but as skill comes his joy in the exe- 
cution increases. Skill comes only with repeti- 
tion. We find in ourselves aptitudes for some 
particular kinds of work, but even these must 
be trained. He must have practice, repetition ; 
and the experience that comes from this will 
make our enjoyment complete. The young per- 
son of to-day is a comparative stranger to this 
enjoyment. He has a restless sort of interest 
when he has any, but persistent concentration 
upon one thing until it is well done is rare. As 
the time draws near for him to leave school he 
ought to be familiar with the joy of conquest 
which comes from independent and sustained 
conflict. 

The artisan of to-day has lost a great incen- 
tive and pleasure in that he seldom sees his work 
grow under his hands to a complete whole. 
The tailor of old found a joy in the completed 
coat. That is unknown to the workman in the 
factory engaged, day after day, in working to 



INFLUENCES. 113 

the finish some particular part of the garment 
only. The former system had an educational 
value, while the other is merely a mechanical, 
soul-killing grind. No wonder that the victim 
of these unhappy conditions flies to the billiard 
table, the saloon, the theatre, as soon as the 
evening comes. Every cell of his body is cry- 
ing out for a change, and dissipation is the only 
relief which society has provided from the dead- 
ening monotony of the day's work. Is the 
fault his or ours ? In what degree are we pre- 
paring the children to resist such a fate? We 
condemn intemperance, and assail high heaven 
with our prayers, while we ignore the effects of 
food, the forming of intemperate habits of feel- 
ing and conduct, the evils of social dissipation, 
and when the mischief is done, we run about 
seeking to reform our victims. Surely we, the 
parents and teachers, are to blame for the bend- 
ing of the twig that makes the crooked tree. 
The fullest answer that can come from prayer 
is the impulse to supply an environment for the 
child that will lead him toward a good stand- 
ard of life at every step. God gives every bird 
its food, but does not drop it into the bird's 
mouth. We sometimes look to the clouds for 
help when the aid we seek is within us. 



ii4 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

Another matter for co-operative study is that 
of amusements. How much and how little may 
the growing child have? What amusements 
are suited to each age ? — their relative value ? — 
their use and abuse? Temperament, health, 
and social conditions all have their bearing on 
this important topic. What someone calls the 
"principle of innoculation" can be often ap- 
plied to advantage. It is impossible to vacci- 
nate the child with certain amusements and 
pastimes innocent in themselves — but made in- 
struments of evil by some in later life — at the 
age he craves them, in such a way that, al- 
though he may take to them violently for a 
time, he will recover and become indifferent to 
them before he is grown. 

Another subject for co-operative considera- 
tion is that of promotions. Complaint is often 
heard that the teacher "crowds the pupil," 
"crams him," "pushes him on before he is 
ready." But the parent is often to blame in 
this matter. When the child has not done the 
work who is it that begs and implores the 
teacher to give him a condition, even when 
the child is in poor health and absolutely unfit 
for any great mental effort? And the reasons 



INFLUENCES. 1 1 5 

given for the request — "John feels so bad!" 
"All his playmates have gone into a higher 
room;" "He is the tallest boy in his class;" 
"His father promised him a gold watch if he 
went up at the end of the term." Frequent 
meetings of mothers and teachers would show 
up this matter in its true light. The class spirit 
is a valuable asset in the school, and chagrin 
and mortification are serious drawbacks which 
should be eliminated from the child's life as 
much as possible ; but a little study of the con- 
ditions and work will provide the parent with 
higher and more humane reasons for desiring 
promotion, while the teacher may gain a more 
sympathetic insight into the mental and physi- 
cal conditions of the home. Inflexible courses 
of study and the same promotion tests for all 
classes of pupils have many sins recorded 
against them. 



u6 THE POINT OF VIEW. 



VIII 

INFLUENCES. 

Continued. 

THE question of athletics for girls de- 
mands serious consideration. Twenty - 
five years of its study and practice 
have transformed the once delicate American 
girl into a Diana. Her mental and physical 
improvement is admitted, but in view of 
woman's maternal functions, may not muscu- 
lar development be carried too far? It is not 
best that all muscles should be like iron. Ob- 
serve the physical exercises given to girls in 
their teens — the kneeling, bending, posing, 
and many others. To put a group of thirty or 
forty girls and boys through this every day 
without the slightest reference to individual 
conditions or sex is unwise. The spiritual con- 
trol of the physical body resulting in grace of 
movement and instant response to the will is 
education ; but girls have no call to be athletes. 



INFLUENCES. 117 

Few of us realize as we ought the value of 
short and frequent rest periods. Every girl 
should be trained in this art from early child- 
hood. The ability to lie prone upon the back 
for a few minutes., and to sleep at will for a 
quarter of an hour, would save many a school 
girl from collapse. These habits are not so 
much a matter of leisure and opportunity as of 
self-control. Napoleon so trained himself that 
he could fall asleep whenever he willed — even 
in the saddle. Though not physically robust, 
he had more endurance than any of his com- 
rades. He knew the value of minutes. Noth- 
ing is more beneficial to health than self-con- 
trol. Training of this kind often prevents in- 
sanity, and a noted prison official declares 
there would be fewer murderers if the children 
in the public schools acquired the power to sit 
perfectly still for five minutes each day. The 
self-control thus gained would arrest the fatal 
blow until the passion that prompted it had 
subsided. Why not make the rest habit second 
nature from early childhood? 

Sleep and fresh air are wonderful remedies 
for tired nerves. Throw open the window 
when the child goes to bed and he will awaken 



n8 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

refreshed, if he is properly protected from a 
draft. Perhaps earlier generations owed some 
of their sturdiness to the fact that their houses 
were more open to the weather, and air-tight 
windows were a thing unknown. 

Certain kinds of piano practice requiring 
monotonous repetition, with no thought back 
of it, are excessively wearing, and should never 
be tolerated. In the last chapter, something 
was said favorable to drill, but the drill there 
referred to was educative, because its partici- 
pants are interested in it and employ it as a 
means of acquiring some desired facility or 
skill. The conditions are different when the 
child is allowed to strum on the piano wearily 
and drearily, intent only upon filling a certain 
number of minutes. This pernicious custom is 
doing much to discourage piano teaching, and 
perhaps the time is near when parents will re- 
alize that the young piano pupil should never 
practice without supervision. Better thirty 
minutes of work under the teacher's eye than 
hours spent in fumbling the key board with 
eyes furtively watching the clock and the mind 
wandering off to the anticipated release from 
drudgery. 



INFLUENCES. 119 

Not only are the educational advantages of 
such a course apparent, but the saving in time 
and money as well as the economy of effort 
must also appeal to us. A large number of our 
children have lost much of their spontaneity 
and healthful enthusiasm in life, and deadening 
piano-practice is one of the causes. Surely 
mother and teacher will eventually come to- 
gether on this subject and evolve something 
better than our present method. There is a 
growing number of instructors in music that 
are working for a reform. The entire field 
offers abundant opportunity to any who will 
work patiently and honestly, while the rewards 
are as great and as certain as any found in 
other paths of original research. 

If the mothers and teachers in each commu- 
nity would agree upon one or two simple prob- 
lems within the experience of the average 
woman, and study them together until some 
reasonable solution had been discovered, the 
results would be far more helpful and valuable 
than anything attained thus far. We seem to 
fear that we will not be considered learned un- 
less we busy ourselves with some abstruse sub- 
ject, and write papers upon it, which are as lit- 



120 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

tie understood by the listeners as they are by 
the writers — forgetting that simplicity is the 
mark of wisdom. The educational doctrines 
of Plato and Aristotle are interesting to be 
sure, but why not study modern American 
methods instead? They ought to be more 
helpful. 

As to the subject of foods, in view of mod- 
ern research, scarcely any one topic is so uni- 
versally important. In some instances it is pos- 
sible to change the sex of an organism through 
its food, as in the case of the bee and tadpole. 
Criminology has shown that moral degeneracy 
attends enfeebled physical conditions which 
have their rise in poorly nourished and 
poorly warmed bodies. Indeed the three agen- 
cies are food, temperance, and social influences. 
Everyone realizes the importance of the last, 
but what association of women in the country 
have studied the subject of foods persistently 
and intelligently until some definite conclusion 
has been reached in reference to the relative 
values of certain articles of diet? They know 
more of the conquest of Peru. We flit like 
butterflies over vast fields of literature and 
history without any definite aim or purpose be- 



INFLUENCES. 121 

yond a vague desire for improvement or show. 
What is the matter ? Are we afraid of appear- 
ing ignorant or common? How can the study 
of anything great or useful belittle us? How 
can we help shining a little in its reflected light ? 

Foods are mentioned only as an illustration. 
There are many other topics of study exceed- 
ingly important and quite as common. 

The average club woman seems to pass 
through three distinct stages of evolution. 
First comes the essay stage, in which the young 
matron writes "lovely papers" whose weak- 
ness is their total failure to touch life at any 
point. To be sure, the blue satin bow that 
adorned the graduation theme a few years be- 
fore is now conspicuously absent, but this is 
the only difference between the two produc- 
tions. Marriage and motherhood have not yet 
greatly widened her horizon, but there is a 
freshness, a keenness of interest, a rosy opti- 
mism that is certainly very promising. In the 
second stage, our fledgling is now full fledged, 
disporting herself in the shadowy vale of mys- 
ticism. The religions of Asia and the philos- 
ophy of the Nile are her delight. The meta- 
physical and esoteric she revels in. She daz- 



122 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

zles her club on an afternoon with her own 
bewilderment. 

The growth of many a club woman is ar- 
rested at this stage. My near neighbor, a sin- 
cere and lovable woman, goes every Wednes- 
day afternoon to discuss the needs, physical 
and spiritual of the babes in Booraboolaga, 
and returns much uplifted and refreshed; her 
own infant in the meantime spends hours in 
the care of a nurse maid who places its nursing 
bottle on the stone parapet, while she, herself 
a child, joins in the play of the group intrusted 
to her care. As I write, the scorching sun is 
shining full upon the bottle from which the 
innocent babe slakes its thirst from time to 
time. Tomorrow we shall hear of a "trouble- 
some night," "the child's inherited delicacy of 
stomach," etc. Yet before bedtime, I, myself, 
may be guilty of as glaring an inconsistency 
and lay my head upon my pillow with a similar 
sense of superiority that sustains the little 
mother in the next square. And so we go on 
until, perchance, some reach the third stage in 
which sincere, wholesome, helpful, sane club 
work is done. The frivolous and the immature 
dropped by the wayside, but the work done by 



INFLUENCES. 123 

those who remain, is effective because they 
have learned to form true estimates of values 
and live up to the rules they lay down for 
others. 

This latter is the secret of success in all pre- 
■/entive and reformatory work whether in the 
school or the home. Nothing so tests one's sin- 
cerity as an honest attempt to live up to his 
own theories. It is easy to exhort a poor 
woman, who earns her bread by scrubbing, to 
keep the Sabbath holy, and to make her home 
attractive and fit for the abode of angels, bul 
let us suppose that we are deprived of our own 
Sunday drive, and shut up six days in the week 
in a hot, steamy kitchen with a fretful babe. 
"I could not reform an ant unless I became 
one," says Tolstoi. He lived under the same 
conditions, and carried the same burdens, as the 
peasant he was trying to help. Did we but fol- 
low the advice we give to others so freely, the 
slums had long ago repented in sackcloth and 
ashes. The slums are as keen as children in not- 
ing the discrepancy between our theory and our 
practice. They know that we do not believe 
what we say, or we would do it ourselves. This 
feeling of unreality is pernicious not alone in 



i2 4 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

club life; it vitiates the home life, and is re- 
flected in greater or less degree by every mem- 
ber of the family circle. Everyone is influenced 
by the unseen, unspoken, but not unfelt, atti- 
tude of those with whom he lives, and this is 
especially true of the very young. The dis- 
honest parent or teacher will unconsciously 
lead his children in the direction of dishonesty, 
even though he tries to appear upright before 
them. Perhaps this is what is meant by "visit- 
ing the sins of the fathers upon the children." 

Few realize the immense importance of their 
mental attitude upon a subject in its influence up- 
on others, especially upon those who are younger 
or dependent in any way upon them. It is not 
easy to be wholly honest. Indeed relative hon- 
esty is all that weak human nature has been 
able to attain thus far, but we shall have pro- 
gressed far, both in intelligence and virtue, 
when we are content to appear as we really are, 
instead of straining every nerve to seem what 
we are not. Club work has a great opportunity 
right here. 

"Why all this fuss about children," re- 
marked an old woman at a mothers' meeting a 
short time ago; "In my days we were taught 



INFLUENCES. 125 

to keep the commandments and were spanked 
when we did wrong." "Yes," said another, 
"But what do you mean by keeping the com- 
mandments?" This seems to be the kernel of 
the whole subject. The commandments are 
interpreted by each generation anew, and by 
each individual according to his ability to keep 
abreast of, or rise above the generally accepted 
views of the time. The simple savage keeps 
the decalogue when he refrains from the 
grosser crimes of murder, robbery, and the 
like. The more subtle violations of the law, 
such as slander, the trickeries of the commer- 
cial world, and the unreality of domestic life 
are beyond his comprehension. To him, sin 
is the commission of certain acts, while with us 
it is the intentional failure to choose the highest 
good. To him, religion is the acceptance of a 
certain creed, to us it is a condition of heart. 
One evidence of the divine origin of the Christ- 
ian religion is that no one can live up to it. 
All that human nature can do is to approximate 
it. When man reaches his ideal it is no 
longer his ideal. When we are able to under- 
stand all truth and to bring science and reve- 
lation into perfect accord, then we shall be as 



i26 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

gods, and growth will cease. As the invention 
of the tool marked the arrest of the develop- 
ment of the body, so would the possession of all 
knowledge bring about the arrest of the growth 
of the mind. The power to think, is the very 
breath of man's nostrils, and marks the differ- 
ence between a joyless, automatic, deadening 
adherence to rules, and a warm, glad growth, 
pulsating with life and happiness. Each year 
finds us a little nearer death, or a little more 
alive. 

This is, in part, the reason why some mothers 
and teachers wear out so much more quickly 
than others. The letter kills but he spirit 
makes alive. No one knew this better than the 
great Froebel, and no one has labored more 
earnestly and intelligently than he to restore 
to the child the conditions for perpetual growth. 
His principles are applicable to every age or 
form of government, but their application must 
differ according to the grade of civilization. 
His system originated under a despotic form of 
government, and was intended to counteract, 
in a degree, the evils of a military regime, 
which regarded the individual merely as a unit 
to be trained for state purposes. Under these 



INFLUENCES. 127 

conditions it is quite in order to pursue certain 
methods, which, in our own country may work 
harm when used by the unskillful. 

Mothers should beware lest the teacher as- 
sume her prerogatives. The public school oc- 
cupies a peculiar position. Emigration brings 
to its doors many totally unacquainted with 
the language and customs of their adopted 
country. Add to these the poor, whose parents 
work early and late, and it can be readily seen 
that the public school is the only institution by 
which certain evils can be remedied. Under 
these conditions it has easily, almost impercep- 
tibly, advanced far beyond its original function, 
while the home has gradually retreated. Now 
the disadvantage of a wrong relation lies in 
the fact that it prevents the establishment of a 
right one. Foster parenthood is not strikingly 
prominent in biology; its adoption by man is 
comparatively recent, and, like other new 
things, apt to be put to uses for which it is not 
intended, to the serious injury of all concerned. 

One striking defect in our attempts at educa- 
tion is the failure to provide interests and oc- 
cupations for old age. So much thought is 
spent upon the beginning of life, so little upon 



128 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

the end. Infancy is, of course, the time for 
building the foundation ; childhood and youth 
are our chief solicitude and must always be; 
middle age receives some attention; but the 
declining years are often unlovely and as 
naked as a leafless tree. 

The early part of life is spent in preparation 
and pleasure ; then come family cares, business 
anxieties, the struggle for a competence; and 
when, at last, declining strength indicates that 
the period of active warfare is over, the worker 
sinks out of public view, thankful indeed if his 
labors have provided a stage for the closing 
scene in his little drama. 

Science is seeking to discover how to pro- 
long life, but what benefit is the mere lengthen- 
ing of years if the time thus added is empty 
and uninteresting. Old age should be a period 
of usefulness and rational enjoyment, and both 
parent and teacher should work definitely to- 
ward this end. No educational system is ade- 
quate that does not build for old age. Having 
health it does not require great material wealth. 
The appetite diminishes as physical activity de- 
clines; warmth, cleanliness, and a small 
amount of food make up the sum of its daily 



INFLUENCES. 129 

necessities ; but what it chiefly craves is recog- 
nition ; its secret grief lies in its consciousness 
of waning power, in the knowledge of a lost 
usefulness. Ths should never be, and need not 
be. "Old men for counsel, young men for 
strength" is the vital and active principle of 
the best civilization. Growing knowledge 
brings better modes of living which tend to- 
ward a steadily increasing length of life. 

This calls for a re-adjustment of educational 
methods to meet the demand of this longer pe- 
riod of repose. Man's education should lay 
the foundation for employment in old age. We 
remain young only so long as the mind is ac- 
tive. Age is not determined by years; many 
die of old age in their youth. Some are never 
alive, while others remind one of a kernel 
which is full of germinal activity. The serious 
evil in luxurious living is the distaste it gives 
for persistent effort and the constantly grow- 
ing desire for something new. Both are fatal 
to happiness at any time of life. The properly 
educated mind never loses its delight in a beau- 
tiful sunset, in a clear sky, or in the tint of a 
flower, but the ability to feel and enjoy the 
companionship with nature must be cultivated 



130 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

as well as the art of money getting or money 
spending. Books are the chief resource for the 
energies of old age, and they are always with 
us. Teach the child to love good reading, and 
he will have the great minds of the world for 
his friends when he is old and they will never 
fail him. Neither financial adversity nor a 
body shorn of its strength can separate them 
from him. 

No one is ever older than he feels. Hospi- 
tality to new ideas is the fountain of perpetual 
youth. Every child should learn how to use 
the public library and the museum before he 
completes the eighth grade. A stiff formal 
visit under supervision once or twice a year is 
not enough. He should know the officials as 
tried and trusted friends. This relationship 
should grow with his years. Thank God there 
are many men and women in the world today 
who are doing untold good by winning the 
confidence of their youthful friends and guid- 
ing their tastes in the right direction. 

The boy or girl who learns to use these two 
institutions properly is educated for all time. 
When once the child has acquired the habit of 
dawdling, gossiping, or lounging on the street 



INFLUENCES. 131 

corner, it is exceedingly hard to create interest 
in better things. There is a deadening influ- 
ence in these and kindred indulgences that is 
not easily explained. They affect all classes 
of society, and when once they become a part 
of the child's life, his sensibilities seem to be 
seared as with a hot iron. 

Music is a never failing source of enjoy- 
ment. Every one should learn to play some in- 
strument. It may not always be possible nor 
profitable to continue this accomplishment 
through life, but the study of a musical instru- 
ment, even if one acquires but little skill in us- 
ing it, will lead to a musical knowledge and a 
discriminating taste that enlarges one's hori- 
zon and adds much to the happiness of declin- 
ing years. This pleasure is not dependent on 
the exhaustive study of elaborate compositions. 
Very many intelligent people do not respond to 
dassical music, but the appreciation grows if 
we continue in a receptive attitude. The sim- 
ple old-fashioned melodies, endeared to us by 
association as well as by their intrinsic 
beauty, ought never be left out of the home. 
Every boy and girl should learn to play and 
sing them. Good music has kept many a 



132 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

hearthstone sweet and pure and the old tunes 
have followed the wanderer to the uttermost 
parts of the earth, awakening memories of 
home. 

The picture of an old father or mother spend- 
ing a twilight existence beside a barely tolerant 
fireside is a disgrace to humanity, a blot upon 
civilization ; and the home which tolerates such 
an exposition of hypocrisy and selfishness well 
deserves all the discontent and unrest from 
which it suffers. It does suffer, for every act 
brings its inevitable consequence, whether of 
joy or pain, and the hearth that is guilty of so 
flagrant an act of cruelty is a stranger to peace 
and contentment. Teach the child to reverence 
the aged if you would make his own life happy. 

Above all, lead him to feel the joy of loving 
service. An act enobles or dwarfs according 
to the motive behind it. The "servant girl" 
problem would be solved if this principle per- 
vaded the home. One child washes dishes with 
a feeling of discontent and repugnance. The 
work to her is miserable drudgery. Another 
performs the service with a glad, joyful heart ; 
she is helping to make the loved ones comfort- 
able. Which, think you, will be the better able 



INFLUENCES. 133 

to train and appreciate servants when she has 
attained to womanhood? Each is performing 
the same service but one is becoming hard and 
sordid, while the other is growing in beauty 
of soul, in a joy of living which the other will 
never know even though the wealth of the In- 
dies were poured into her lap. Which will you 
have? There is no neutral ground. We must 
choose one or the other. The same question 
comes to each one, though in a different form ; 
rich and poor alike must meet and answer it — 
shall it be the service prompted by love, or the 
service that is mere drudgery? Slave or free, 
which are we ? Heaven is within us if we will 
have it so. 

The old German tale of the little girl whose 
loaf of bread was sour because she wore a sour 
look while kneading it is as true as history. Let 
the little ones learn it. The child who com- 
plains of being ill after indulging in a fit of 
anger is probably telling the truth. He is suf- 
fering from poison. The fluids coursing 
through his body are changed, and the repair 
of the tissues is arrested, in a measure. If joy 
and love bring health, why should not anger 
and hate bring sickness? 



134 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

Suggestion is a wonderful power but little 
understood, and like every other influence it is 
capable of producing good or evil results. As 
some years in the child's life are considered 
more critical than others with reference to 
physical and spiritual well-being, so too, some 
months of each year may be more critical than 
others with reference to the formation of 
tastes and habits. 

The parent is apt to say that his child's bad 
habits have been acquired in school. Such a 
parent would be surprised if he discovered how 
accurately, yet unconsciously, the child portrays 
his home life in the school. The average 
teacher cannot fail to form a tolerably correct 
picture of each pupil's environment out of 
school by his conduct within it. 

The public school is the most truly demo- 
cratic institution in the country; without it, a 
caste system would prevail as well defined as in 
any old time monarchy. Within the school- 
room are found representatives of all classes 
of society who there learn to estimate one an- 
other at their true worth regardless of wealth 
or social position. 



INFLUENCES. 135 

A friend who has just returned from a visit 
to her native city asks, "What makes the work 
so bad in the schools?" Primarily it is be- 
cause school officers elected by popular vote 
seek to meet the wishes of their constituents, 
except when they have some personal interest 
of their own to advance. If the people's 
ideals are low, their representatives have 
low ideals, and the work of the board is 
poorly done. The teaching force is under the 
control of officers who have their finger on the 
pulse of public opinion. If that is indifferent, 
the schools are apt to be farmed out for the 
advancement of private interests. As are the 
people, so are the schools. 

The present intensely commercial spirit that 
pervades all departments of educational work 
is the chief obstacle to progress. At the close 
of the Civil War conditions gave opportunities 
for the acquirement of wealth hitherto un- 
known. Many who were poor suddenly be- 
came rich, while the wealthy multiplied their 
possessions by thousands. The present fren- 
zied pursuit of wealth is the result. The at- 
mosphere has become saturated with this 
desire, and every school inspector, lawyer, or 



136 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

politician who mounts the platform preaches 
the doctrine of "getting on." Commercial 
prosperity is the fetish of the nation, and greed 
and corruption are rampant everywhere. For- 
merly those who had done most for their fellow 
men were the standards set up for the young. 
But these ideals have vanished like hoar frost 
on a May morning. Men are now looked upon 
and admired as heroes, not for the service they 
have done, but for the great wealth they have 
acquired, and the boys who listened to their 
eloquence clothed in faulty syntax conclude 
that correct speech and decent consideration 
for others are not necessary to success. 

We are nearing the dawn of a better day, be- 
cause the homes and the school are uniting in 
planting the conviction in the hearts of the 
rising generation that it is "Righteousness that 
exalteth a nation." The generation now at the 
helm are irrevocably committed to the ideals so 
indelibly impressed upon them in their youth, 
that they cannot change materially, and the 
hope of the country is in the children who are 
to follow us. So deep seated is this convic- 
tion in the minds of little children that wealth 
is the chief purpose of life, that they write in 



INFLUENCES. 137 

their exercise books : "My reason for attending 
school is, I must get on in my lessons, for I 
want to get money." 



138 THE POINT OF VIEW. 



T 



IX. 

CONCLUSION. 
HE trend of thought has altered much dur- 
ing the past fifty or sixty years, and no- 
where is this more apparent than in the 
treatment of children. The term "New Edu- 
cation" is not altogether a misnomer, though 
it is not really an attempt to introduce something 
new. It is rather an endeavor to discover what 
has been in man for centuries, and is funda- 
mental and lasting. Influences which have 
tended to stimulate this study are classified as 
follows : 

First — The scientific discoveries of Darwin 
and others. 

Second — The application of these discover- 
ies by Herbert Spencer and his colleagues. 

Third — The so-called Higher Criticism of 
the Bible and Religion. 

Fourth — The many inventions which, by 
rapid transit and facilitating various industries, 
have rapidly changed our national life. 



CONCLUSION. 1 39 

The first and second classes of influences have 
been already considered in this book. Of the 
third class it is only needful to say that the 
accepted modern definition of the word ever- 
lasting as not necessarily meaning endless or 
eternal, in the sense popularly understood, has 
modified our theories of the world to come. 
The good and evil effects of the comparatively 
sudden change in what have heretofore been 
considered the fundamental propositions of the 
Christian religion, have been many and import- 
ant. A large and more hopeful view of the 
future has been accompanied by a growing dis- 
regard of present duty. The two conflicting 
influences are resulting in a confusion of mind 
which is dangerous to the rising generation, and 
is changing the character of the home as well 
as the sense of moral obligation among the 
people in general. This seems to be the imme- 
diate results of every shifting of ground from 
one fundamental view to another in the growth 
of public opinion. But there are other reasons 
for the present prevailing disregard of justice 
and of duty. 

Prior to 1848 we were a small people living 
on the Atlantic coast; little was known of the 



14© THE POINT OF VIEW. 

country west of the Mississippi, and the vast 
resources of the area beyond were as yet not 
even dreamed of. The prevalence of hand la- 
bor, and the difficulties of travel tended to keep 
the people near together in little communities 
where all, coming under the same influences 
and possessing the same interests, necessarily 
shared in the same views and opinions. At this 
time the school and the home were closely con- 
nected. The teacher knew the members of each 
family in the district, and respect for law and 
authority was felt even when obedience did not 
follow. 

But there came a change. The tide of emi- 
gration set in, bringing people to our shores 
from every nation. Facilities for travel grew 
apace; the use of machinery in place of hand 
labor transformed society in every center. Then 
same the great influx of domestic inventions; 
later the telephone, the gas stove, and the vari- 
ous applications of electricity, after these the 
electric car, the bicycle, and the automobile. 
The general result has been the bringing to- 
gether in constantly changing combinations, 
people of every creed and degree of intelligence 
and morality. The home, the school, the 



CONCLUSION. 141 

church, the neighborhood, and the state felt 
the influence. The home, from its secluded 
character, was the last to show the effects of 
this change, and it may be the last to re-adjust 
itself to the new conditions. 

The multiplication of amusements and the 
diminution of household requirements have 
produced restlessness in the home life fatal to 
that repose so necessary to the best home 
training. 

The school-child of today is more intelligent 
and less reliable than the child of earlier gener- 
ations. How can we bring back this sterling trait 
without losing what is gained by better school 
instruction ? If the country is to hold together, 
if the five institutions of our civilization are to 
survive and improve, childhood must be taught 
a higher respect for law and law-givers. The 
minor influences tending in an opposite direc- 
tion must be checked, no matter how unim- 
portant they may seem. The important things 
are the small things. The youth who speaks of 
the chief executive as "Teddy," and uses a 
pocket handkerchief bordered with small 
American flags, has received his first lesson in 
disregard of law and disrespect of country. 



142 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

The country is greatly agitated just now on 
the subject of divorce. The seat of the evil 
cannot be reached by legislation. The prepa- 
ration for marriage should begin in the cradle. 
The child who is indulged from babyhood, who 
knows no will but its own, who cares for no 
one but itself, is not apt to make in after years 
an ideal husband or wife. Strange that women 
so often excuse in their sons those traits of 
character that, in their husbands, have caused 
them suffering. 

One great evil that confronts the home today 
is the withdrawal of the father from family 
life. The causes are many. Among the chief, 
is the rise of commercial spirit and the increas- 
ing competition in all branches of industry. 
Many a father is compelled to strain every 
nerve to keep abreast of his competitors, and 
when night comes he is fit for nothing but the 
easy chair, or some light entertainment that 
will make no demand upon brain or body. This 
is the chief reason why our theaters are filled 
with light plays that appeal only to the eye; 
the reason why the son steals out of the door 
to go where he can "enjoy himself;" the rea- 
son why the wife fails to talk over with her 



CONCLUSION. i43 

husband the growing faults in their boy, and 
seek for the counsel which only a father can 
give. Meanwhile the mad pace goes on ; how 
much or how little each parent is to blame for 
the iliad of woes experienced and threatened, 
the parent only knows. 

But one thing is certain ; few men are able 
to give their children both moral stamina and 
large wealth. To raise truly intelligent chil- 
dren requires a blending of both feminine and 
masculine ideals. There must be close daily 
personal contact with both parents. Schools 
and masters however clever can not give the 
effective touch — it must be warm, close, intelli- 
gent family life. The man who makes a for- 
tune rarely has energy to enjoy it afterward. 
The effort has been too great, and he generally 
regrets when too late that he spent so much to 
gain so little. 

It is all merely a question of ideals and in 
this, as in everything else, each one must make 
his choice. One gets what he works for, for 
the most part, especially in the life that is 
worth living. 

Two men were digging under my window 
a few months ago, when one dropped his 



144 THE POINT OF VIEW. 

spade. "I've found another nickel," he cried. 
"Pshaw," said the other, "I never find any- 
thing but buttons." "You never look for any- 
thing but buttons," retorted his companion; 
"You find buttons because you look for 'em;" 
and so it is. We get what we seek in this world 
and must not grumble if it proves to be but- 
tons. The saddest feature is that the innocent, 
helpless children must suffer for our mistakes. 
But all is not lost if the home holds together. 
We must return to a simpler life. We must 
take off the leaden cloak of seeming to be what 
we are not. We must eat, dress, and entertain 
according to our income, without considering 
what our neighbors think. We can never be 
truly ourselves while dominated by others' 
ideals. To be other than one's self is to be 
nothing. The world today is full of copies, 
often of bad originals. Every one is capable of 
being an original and there is some one thing 
he can do better than anyone else. Something 
for which the world is waiting. Teach the 
child in home and in school to find and do this 
one thing, and he is no longer a slave, but free. 
A foolish imitation of others has no tempta- 
tions for him because his source of joy is in 



CONCLUSION. 145 

himself. It is only the empty mind that seeks 
to fill itself with cheap imitations. And family 
life is the place to bring out the real thing ; to 
encourage, to burnish, to love the best of which 
each member is capable. 

But in spite of all that has been said of our 
shortcomings, we are approaching the dawn of 
a day more glorious than any that have gone 
before. Greater opportunities bring greater 
success to him who can improve them. The 
child today is being cared for more intelli- 
gently than ever before. The light of recent 
discovery has come upon us so suddenly that 
our eyes are blinded for the moment; but as 
time passes our mental vision will grow clearer, 
the judgment truer. Much that is now retained 
will be cast aside as useless, while some things 
temporarily discarded will be brought back in 
a larger and better way. The home will regain 
its former influence and power, and the glory 
of coming generations will center around that 
most sacred of all human institutions. The 
American Hearthstone. 

THE END. 



146 POINT OF VIEW. 



List of Valuable Books of Reference to be 
found in most small Public Libraries. 



Chapter I. 

Babies and Monkeys. — Popular Science Monthly, Jan 
uary 5 1895, Vol. 46, p. 371. 

The Tree Dwellers.— The Age of Fear.— Katherine 
E. Dopp. — Rand, McNally & Company, Chicago. 

The Primitive Family. — Thwing. 

The Evolution of The Family. — Popular Science 
Monthly, Vol. 40, p. 257. 

The Story of Ab.— Stanley Waterloo. 

The Story of Primitive Man. — Cladd. — Appleton & 
Company. 

Early Man in Britain. — Dawkins. — McMillan Co. 

How to Make Baskets.— Mary White. 

Indian Basketry. — George W. Jones. 

Drummond's Ascent of Man. 

Some Fundamental Principles of Sunday School and 
Bible Teaching. — Pedagogical Seminary, Decem- 
ber, 1901. 

Chapter II. 

The Motor Ability of Children. — Annual Report, 
Commissioner of Education, 1898, Vol. 2, p. 1291. 



BOOKS OF REFERENCE. 147 

Influence of Exercise on Growth. — Journal Exper. 
Med., 1896, Vol. 1, p. 516. 

Relation Between Growth and Disease. — Am. Medi- 
cal Association, 1891. 

Influences of Palatal Deformities in Idiots. — Journal 
of Medical Science, Jan. 1897, Vol. 43, p. 72. 

A Study in Youthful Degeneracy.— Pedagogical Semi- 
nary, p. 221, Dec. 1906. 

Chapter III. 

Fatigue in School Children. — Educational Review 
Jan. 1898, p. 34. 

Study of Imitation. — Annual Report, Commissioner 
of Education, Vol. 1, 1896-97, Chapter 13. 

Physical Training.— Same, 1898, Vol. 1, p. 487. 

Chapter IV. 

Child Study and Religious Education. — Child Study 
Monthly, Oct. 1896, Vol. 2, p. 289. 

The Early Cave Men.— The Age of Combat.— Kather- 
ine E. Dopp. 

The Later Cave Men.— The Age of the Chase. — 
Katherine E. Dopp. 

The Tent Dwellers.— The Early Fishing Man.— 
Katherine E. Dopp. 

Chapter V. 

The Place of Industries in Elementary Education 
— Katherine E. Dopp. 



1 48 POINT OF VIEW. 

Some Steps in the Evolution of Social Occupations. 

— Katherine E. Dopp. 
The Elementary School Teacher, March and April, 1903. 

Origin of Inventions. — Mason. 

Punishments as Seen by Children.— Pedagogical Semi- 
nary, Vol. 3, p. 235. 

Educative Value of Children's Questioning. — Popular 
Science Monthly, Vol. 44, p. 799. 

Chapter VI. 

Industrial Education. — Annual Report, Commis- 
sioner of Education, 1896, Vol. 1, p. 443. 

The Sorrows of Childhood.— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9. 

The Boyhood of Great Men. — Annual Report, Com- 
missioner of Education, 1898, Vol. 2, p. 1294. 

Increase in Volume of Heart at Puberty. — Annual 
Report, Commissioner of Education, Vol. 1, 1898 
p. 995. 

Growth of First Born Children.— Same, p. 1100. 

Children Larger Born in Summer. — Same, p. 994. 

Only Children.— Same, 1898, Vol. 2, p. 1349. 

Miscellaneous. 
A Mornings Observation of a Baby. — Fletcher B. 

Dresslar. 
The First Modern Schoolmaster. — Wm. H. Burnham. 
Children's Ideals.— Adelaide E. Wyckoff. 
All may be found in Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. 8, 

No. 4, Dec. 1901. 
School Breakdown.— Medical News, 1900, Vol. 77, 

p. 208. 



DEC 4 1905 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 840 009 9 



